Kemi Badenoch is God’s Anointed
By: Deji Yesufu
On the 6th of March 2025 will be the 116th posthumous birthday of the only Nigerian ever referred to as a sage: Obafemi Awolowo. I have been in touch with the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, and they have informed me that this edition will be a webinar to be chaired by Mr. Thabo Mbeki and one of the guest speakers will be Kingsley Moghalu. Ambassador Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu is the brain behind the foundation. She is the only surviving child of the sage. I asked madam Ambassador a difficult question recently: I told her that I have come to understand that there is a world of difference between Obafemi Awolowo and Bola Tinubu, the man at the top of affairs in Nigeria today. I asked her if she agrees with me. Madam Ambassador replied by saying that she usually does not answer those kinds of questions. I think it is not that the former ambassador to the Netherlands under the Obasanjo administration is afraid of political attack dogs; she just probably realises that Nigeria is greater than any one human being. And that the founding fathers of this country have put machineries in place for us to fix our problems. When you consider the minds that will be the key participants at that webinar, you will understand what I am talking about.
I heard the phrase “small minds” from Wole Okunnuga, and since then, I have tried to be a man of great thinking. Obafemi Awolowo, in his autobiography “Awo”, told us a story he read very early in his life. He said someone did an experiment where they took large spheres of great weight and placed them at the bottom of a jar, while they took smaller spheres of light weight and put them at the top. When the jar is shaken vigorously, the larger spheres come up, and the lighter ones sink. The lesson is that we all have a duty to build our thinking. Life will come with shaking, and only men of weight will rise to the top of issues. Obafemi Awolowo became a sage because he made himself a man of great weight. He built himself in wisdom and character and was able to discern the need of a people; then, he put himself in a position to meet that need. Awolowo left the government in 1959. His government in the former Western Region of Nigeria was comparable to any that one could find in the Western world, such that even white men said that he had abilities to be Prime Minister of Britain. What makes a person a great leader? It is not the ability to be a likeable person. It is the ability to see a people’s problem and solve it. The closest to an Awolowo that I see in my lifetime is Kemi Badenoch, and I’ll explain why.
When I write that Kemi Badenoch is anointed by God, I am not saying that she is a Christian minister; neither am I saying she is born again – I’m aware she is agnostic. I’m saying that just as God called Cyrus my anointed (Isaiah 45:1), so is Kemi God’s anointed. We forget very quickly that beyond the religious persuasions of individuals, God is the maker of every person. God gives us all the wisdom and experiences we have. God determines the nations we live in, the person we marry, the children we have, etc. God alone could have given Britain a Kemi Badenoch today! Here is a once upon a time superpower. (Obafemi Awolowo said that the British are a first rate imperialist.) How an island, off the coast of Europe, invaded the world and at some point was colonising almost a third of the world – only a foremost imperialist could have done that. Yet, the same British people are a sorry case to look on today. Leftists have taken over Britain, and Islam is encroaching in that country. And people think Kemi Badenoch is the problem?
I have done two videos on Kemi Badenoch already. In the first one, I speak on who she is. In the second one, I spoke on the science of government – where I argued that government is a complicated subject that needs great thinkers to deal with. Kemi has Nigerian parentage. She was born in the UK and obtained citizenship through birth. She relocated to the UK when she was 16 to make a life for herself. She began to have experiences in her life that compelled her to make comparisons between Nigeria and Britain. She joins the Conservative Party to help solve a problem. She sees that the same factors that have made Nigeria underdeveloped are today invading the UK. She is now the leader of the Conservative Party, and Nigerians think she came to the office to serve them? Again, the small mindedness that has kept us where we are.
As long as I live, I’ll curse the people who took history away from our curriculum in Nigeria. When people do not know where they are coming from, how will they chart a way forward for themselves? The whole of South East Nigeria is collapsing today because someone had sold a faulty history to the Ibos. But that’s a digression. There is a need to remind ourselves where we are coming from. By the middle of the 19th century, there was no country called Nigeria. The area that is now called Nigeria was carved out to the British by European colonisers in the 1885 Berlin Conference. The British imperialists did not come to Nigeria for missionary endeavours; they came here to get resources to develop their land. The British gave this country its name: the-Niger-area: Nigeria. With time, they understood that they could also invest in Nigeria and make this place a liveable space for themselves because of our clement weather. By the 1930s, the missionaries who brought the gospel to Africa had exposed young Nigerians to literacy. Herbert Macaulay, grandson of Bishop Ajayi Crowther, was the first thorn in the flesh of the imperialists. He passed the baton to Nnamdi Azikwe and Obafemi Awolowo. These two men led their regions to such stellar heights that the British were convinced we could govern ourselves. With the loss of a million men to the two great wars and public opinion rising against colonial rule at home, the British handed over an independent country to us. I will not bore you with how this country failed to build on the legacy passed to us.
Now, sixty-five years after the colonisers left Nigeria, Nigerians are now leaving the country in droves, escaping economic hardship through japa, and heading to Britain. Kemi Badenoch and her party realize that the goody-goody social system that opens the British borders to immigrants from failed states can not work. If these countries were born by the British, and these people claim they can govern their country; if they fail at it, the British people should not pay for their mistakes. Nigerians made it clear sixty-five years ago that they do not wish to be colonised by the British; why are they today heading to the West to do jobs akin to being colonised in foreign countries?
Kemi Badenoch is a servant of God because she is forcing us all to rethink japa. Where are you all going to? If we were educated by this country – some of us got practically free education throughout our schooling – why do we abandoned the country because incompetent men are at the helm of its affairs? Our duty is to ensure that government is held responsible, and where she fails we change it. We must set up political parties that will wrest power via democratic means from our bad leaders and give it to good leaders, and one way to do this is to remain in the country and fight. Not japa. It is understandable that some will leave – obviously a nation only needs a few right thinking people to fix it. As I have said elsewhere, I say here again: Kemi Badenoch is not our problem. She is a servant of the British people and she is doing what God has called her to do. We are the ones to wake up to our duties as a people and fix this country. No one else will do it for us. If the likes of Awolowo whom we celebrate today had not risen against the British, we will not be where we are. We owe the next generation the duty of ridding Nigeria of bad leadership.
Deji Yesufu is the pastor of Providence Reformed Baptist Church Ibadan. He is the author of HUMANITY and VICTOR BANJO.
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