Kemi Badenoch has stated that she no longer identifies as Nigerian and doesn’t hold a Nigerian passport. The Conservative party leader, who was born in London but spent much of her upbringing in Nigeria and the US before returning to the UK at age 16, revealed she hasn’t renewed her Nigerian passport in over 20 years.

Speaking on 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.”

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Born in 1980, Badenoch was among the last to automatically receive British citizenship by birth before Margaret Thatcher abolished the law in 1981, “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.

She explained that her return to the UK was motivated by her parents’ concerns, “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 also recalled “never quite feeling that I belonged there”.

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Speaking on the podcast, she said she hadn’t experienced significant racial discrimination in Britain: “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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Badenoch returned to the UK at 16 to live with a family friend and study for her A-levels, as Nigeria faced increasing political and economic instability. When her father, Femi Adegoke, died in Nigeria in 2022, she obtained a visa to travel there, calling the process a “big fandango”. She has occasionally clashed with Nigerian authorities, in 2023, Nigeria’s vice-president Kashim Shettima suggested she could “remove the Kemi from her name” if she wasn’t proud of her “nation of origin”. While the reason for his remarks remains unclear, Badenoch has often criticised corruption in Nigeria and the fear she felt growing up there.

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