A Country and Its Diaspora

The divided reaction of the Nigerian public to the emergence of forty-four-year-old Kemi Badenoch as the first black woman to lead Britain’s Conservative Party is a teachable moment on the many unspoken tensions and complications of the home-diaspora relationship.

As expected, many Nigerian commentators have made the most of the fact that she is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who in fact spent a good part of her childhood in Lagos, the country’s commercial capital. While media entrepreneur Mo Abudu describes her accomplishment as “evidence of the possibility of breaking limitations and embracing strengths” and “a reminder to every woman and young girl that no dream is out of reach,” former presidential aide Reno Omokri urged Nigerians to revel in the fact that the leadership of the Conservative Party “is the highest height a person of Nigerian heritage has ever achieved in the Western hemisphere.”

At the same time, others have bristled at Ms. Badenoch’s unexpurgated description of the life she fled in Nigeria. For example: “I saw real poverty. Doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power; fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away because the nationalized water company could not get water out of the taps. Unlike many born since 1980, I was unlucky enough to live under socialist policies. It is not something I would wish on anyone.” Ms. Badenoch has also referred to Nigeria as a country “where the lights didn’t come on, where we ran out of fuel frequently despite being an oil-producing country.”

While none of this is inaccurate, and while, as a matter of fact, Nigerians themselves often describe the country in similarly uncomplimentary terms, nonetheless, Ms. Badenoch has been accused of “demeaning” her “roots” by saying that she does not want her country (the United Kingdom) to “become like the place I ran away from” and of engaging in “Nigeria-bashing” for her insistence that a succession of “leftist policies eroded private wealth in Nigeria.”        

If Nigerians themselves are not beyond disparaging the country, what explains the anger directed at Ms. Badenoch?

One explanation is what, for want of a better term, we might call the politics of representation, whereby a Nigerian outside the country is expected to show fidelity to an unwritten honor code which holds that one “never take sides against the family”—no matter what. From the perspective of Ms. Badenoch’s Nigerian critics, as if it is not bad enough that she violated that code, worse still, she practically disowned Nigeria by referring to the United Kingdom as “my country.” For the average Nigerian, the stickiness of Nigerian heritage is such that once you trace your ancestry to Nigeria, you can only be a “sojourner” elsewhere, even when born outside the country. Kemi Badenoch’s fulsome and, it must be stated, fully modern, embrace of her British identity is perceived to be at odds with this sentiment.

Another reason is Ms. Badenoch’s politics, specifically her identity as a conservative. Among a cross section of Nigerians, a binary understanding of British politics prevails as follows: Labour Party equal “Good”; Conservative Party equal “Not Good.” From this standpoint, not only are Ms. Badenoch’s politics disagreeable, her membership of the Conservative Party, one that many continue to see as a party reserved for white people alone, is interpreted as letting down the side, if not in fact a betrayal of her “blackness”. The irony, of course, is that, shorn of the party label, there is considerable evidence that most Nigerians share many of Ms. Badenoch’s conservative views, especially regarding family, sexuality, and religion.

If there is one thing on which major players in the international development arena hold a settled opinion, it is the assumption that the diaspora is vital, or, depending on whom you ask, holds the key to social transformation across the developing world. With over two hundred million people of African descent currently living outside the continent (according to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2019, there were over 1.9 million African immigrants living in the country), hopes have been raised that a diaspora which has excelled in every work of life can be the conduit for development in a region where successive interventions have repeatedly foundered. In the case of Nigerian immigrants in the United States, to take just one example, their evident success (“In 2023, the median household income for Nigerian-Americans was $80,711, higher than the total population’s”) has increased expectation that Nigerians abroad can spearhead efforts to trigger economic renewal in the country.

While not necessarily misplaced, this expectation rests on a superficial understanding of the complicated nature of the relationship between Africans in the diaspora and Africans in the motherland. If the relationship between Nigerians in the diaspora and their compatriots back home, as illustrated by the Badenoch case, is any indication, it is a dynamic that, even when clearly dominated by pride at how Nigerians abroad have “represented” the country and made its citizens proud, retains a certain undercurrent of anger, resentment, and perhaps even a sprinkle of envy. Nigerians back home are understandably filled with pride when Nigerians in the diaspora “dominate,” with such examples of “domination” providing another layer in the well-laid foundation of Nigerian exceptionalism. Yet, the same Nigerians are loath to surrender the reins of the narrative about Nigeria and are quick to take umbrage when a successful member of the diaspora, one whose sense of connection to the country may be tenuous, is deemed to have stepped out of bounds.

Recognizing this strange concoction, and understanding what is at stake when a relationship apparently all sweetness and light becomes suddenly befouled, is crucial to successful policymaking in regard to diaspora participation in the economic and political life of their “home” countries.