I’m no longer Nigerian, haven’t renewed passport in 20 years, says Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch, UK cabinet minister and senior member of the Conservative Party, says she no longer identifies as Nigerian and has not held a Nigerian passport for the past 20 years.

Speaking on the Rosebud podcast hosted by Gyles Brandreth, Badenoch said although she has Nigerian roots and spent part of her childhood in the country, she does not consider Nigeria part of her identity.

“I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really,” she said.

“I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there.”

Born in London, Badenoch spent some of her early years in Nigeria and the United States before returning to the United Kingdom at the age of 16. She said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport since, and that home, for her, is now firmly in Britain.

“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,” she said.

Badenoch, who currently serves as secretary of state for business and trade, said her return to the UK was driven by what her parents saw as a bleak future in Nigeria at the time.

“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 said.

Reflecting on her experience growing up in Nigeria, she said she never quite felt a sense of belonging.

“I never quite felt that I belonged there,” she said.

She also opened up about the challenges she faced navigating early adulthood in the UK.

“The toughest thing I had to do was to fend for myself at 18.”

Badenoch is among the last group of people who benefitted from birthright citizenship in the UK before the policy was scrapped in 1981 under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

“Finding out that I did have British citizenship was a marvel to so many of my contemporaries, so many of my peers,” she said.