Kemi Badenoch has said she no longer considers herself Nigerian and does not possess a Nigerian passport.
The Conservative party leader, who was born in London, but grew up in Nigeria and the US and did not return to the UK until she was 16, said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades.
Speaking to the Rosebud podcast, Badenoch said: “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really. I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there.
“But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family, my extended family, I call it.”
In 1980 Badenoch was among the last people to automatically receive British citizenship because she was born in the UK. Margaret Thatcher abolished birthright citizenship the following year.
“Finding out that I did have that British citizenship was a marvel to so many of my contemporaries, so many of my peers,” she said.
“I think the reason that I came back here was actually a very sad one, and it was that my parents thought: ‘There is no future for you in this country.’” She recalled “never quite feeling that I belonged there”.
The future Tory leader moved back to the UK aged 16 to live with a friend of her mother because of the worsening political and economic situation in Nigeria, and to study for her A-levels.
When Badenoch’s father, Femi Adegoke, who was a doctor, died in Nigeria in 2022 she obtained a visa to travel there, which she described as a “big fandango”.
She has on occasion clashed with the Nigerian government. Last year the country’s vice-president, Kashim Shettima, suggested she could “remove the Kemi from her name” if she was not proud of her “nation of origin”.
It is unclear what promoted Shettima’s remarks but Badenoch has frequently spoken about corruption in Nigeria and growing up with a sense of fear and insecurity.
The Tory leader told the podcast she had not experienced racial prejudice in Britain “in any meaningful form”. “I knew I was going to a place where I would look different to everybody, and I didn’t think that that was odd,” she said.
“What I found actually quite interesting was that people didn’t treat me differently, and it’s why I’m so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.”
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