Kemi and the Iroko ‘curse’

July 29, 2025 by Olakunle Abimbola

LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 27: Leader of Britain's opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on immigration on November 27, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Peter Nicholls/Getty Images)

How do you pronounce that Scottish name, Badenoch?  Baid-nok as the Brits would? Or Ba-de-nok as Africans, particularly the Yoruba?

That’s Kemi Badenoch’s first “curse of the Iroko”!  The Iroko tree, in Yoruba tradition, doesn’t rush to crush deviants. Running down her homeland will earn her sure ruin!

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke (Nigerian) became the proud — haughty, even — Mrs Kemi Badenock (British). 

But as she stamps Nigeria under her British conceit, Ba-de-nock, the Scottish insurance that gifts her such insufferable hauteur, rings true of her Nigerian roots! 

Still, she ought to have taken a cue from her beloved, immensely British husband, Hamish Alexander Badenoch.  Badenoch!  A living proof of Britain’s ancestral horrors!

Hamish was born in Wimbledon, England — like Oyinbokemi (as Sam Omatseye dubbed her).  But were Britain a settler country like the United States, he would be English — and perhaps he regards himself as one.  But her mum was Irish.  Badenoch, his father’s name, is ancestrally Scottish — from the Gaelic original: “baideanach”.

Now, you don’t need to be an expert in British history to know the Scots and the Irish bore the brunt of English ancient savagery, just to subdue the British Isles. 

The Scot, fiercest rivals of the English, gave as much as they got.  Yet, got yoked into some — uneasy(?) — cohabitation.  The Irish were much more clobbered.  Yet, remain the fiercest in proclaiming their Irish-ness. 

If the United Kingdom — of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — ever hangs on a thread, it might well be because Northern Ireland is split between unionists/loyalists (pro-UK) and nationalists/republicans (pro-United Ireland). 

But either as Ulster unionists or Irish nationalists, Irish nationalism bubbles, perhaps with a tad more fizz, than Gaelic nationalism, which is not exactly a baby’s moan. Still, the Scot-Irish common peeve is clear disdain for English domination.

Mr. Badenock, who in his psyche packs that latent volcano of ugly British history, has worked all over Africa — Malawi, Lagos-Nigeria, Kenya.  But not once did he betray any vile distemper against his homeland, even with his joint ancestors so cruelly mangled by the English.

His Nigerian wife is the diametric opposite, though it’s not quite clear what’s biting her. In her serial misadventure, she has trashed her native Yoruba tact, with her adopted British diplomacy — all to thrash herself, in her arch-delusion of thrashing Nigeria.

Indeed, for Mrs. Badenoch, it has been a grotesque double whammy: scorned in her native Nigeria; shunned by the introspective class among the Brits: the very people she labours hard to ingratiate herself.  Enter, a loathe-worthy dud of both cultures!

If you doubt, recall British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s brutal put down, bang in the House of Commons, of poor Mrs. Badenoch, more-Brit-than-the-British, the supposed Tory Leader: 

“She has appointed herself, I think, saviour of the western civilization, in a desperate search for relevance”!  Sardonic humour: biting, classic, British!

Didn’t even know which bit more: the guffaw of contempt that swallowed the chamber or the Brit Oyinbokemi, her smile frozen into a grimace, looking like trapped game!

Yet, it was all so logical: if Kemi so passionately scorns her skin (Nigerian nativity), how can she possibly adore the mere sheen over it (her plastic Britishness)?  Indeed, how?

Since Mrs. Badenoch started her anti-Nigeria misadventure, all she has reaped is a relay of what her Yoruba folks back at home call “a-si-so” (doomed to mis-jiving); and “a-si-se” (fated to misbehaving).

Yet, the goodly Kashim Shettima, Vice President of the Federal Republic, had tried to steer Mrs. Badenoch off her self-destruct ways: stop denigrating Nigeria or risk being soon a self-chiselled nobody, even in the British political sphere.

But Shettima, a man of style, tact and wit, didn’t sound so stark, in his two-way advice. One: why doesn’t  Kemi be like Rishi Sunak, the Hindu-Indian ex-UK PM and Tory Leader — a “brilliant young man” who “never denigrated his nation of ancestry”, even if he hugged his Britishness no less?

But if that was beyond the vainglorious British-Nigerian, why not a clean break: remove Kemi from her name, and fully live the cultural jetsam she had made of herself!

Cultural jetsam?  Yes, because Nigeria, as the proverbial Oyingbo market, is so packed it misses the absence of no one!  Nigeria would move on to her manifest destiny, with or without the self-loathing Oyinbokemi!

But that rebuke only stung her into further recklessness.  It’s true as the Yoruba say: the doomed dog is deaf to the hunter’s whistle!

First, an alter ego declared she’s no PR spinner for Nigeria — true.  Then, “with her chest” — as they say in that pidgin lingo — she growled that Nigeria was a bastion of crooked politicians and criminal police, that robbed her brother of valuables.

But that verbal diarrhoea would gift us what drove her Nigeria hate — Fulani hate! Her Yoruba people, she claimed, had little in common with the stony savages of the North!

Now, what was that? The “British” hyper-educated version of the stark “Yoruba Nesan” campaign? 

But as the “Yoruba Nesan” campaign sadly showed, cultural condescension is no sole bastion of the plebs!  Plebeians, patricians and in-between were well captured!

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That Freudian slip was clear, from Kemi Badenoch’s riposte to VP Shettima.

Still, the good thing is that the Yoruba dodged the IPOB Igbo bullet — that wild tail wagging the dog, and pushing the collective into avoidable catastrophe — just because Nigeria had a “Fulani” president, and you must choke his tenure with blind hate: the same toxin you accuse the Fulani of!

But even for Britisher Mrs. Badenoch, that wasn’t even bad enough — every vocal pun intended!  On CNN, she must run her mouth about Nigerian citizenship, in a fit of combative ignorance!

That CNN show of shame had own irony — and it wasn’t pretty.  Fareed Zakaria has earned global fame and awe for his well-researched, razor-sharp Global Public Square (GPS) series on CNN. 

So, if our Oyinbokemi chose to display her arrogant ignorance, couldn’t Zakaria himself — a proud ethnic Indian but America’s ever-shining intellectual diamond — have fact-checked her, even with a prompting question?   The Nigerian Constitution of 1999 isn’t exactly a closet document!

Still, it’s stiff  — and sweet — Karma: her perverse tantrums on Nigeria have dragged her to CNN to spew rubbish and further de-market herself! Didn’t the Bible say what you spewed ruined you, not what you gulped?

But among the Yoruba, it’s even more foreboding: the concept of “eedi”!  Her ailment would seem verbal “eedi”. She won’t stop until she talks herself from promise to nothing.

The Tories will soon realize — if they have not already — that their Nigeria chatterbox is a diplomatic liability — about time!  Who wants to lug such liability as PM — or which country, in the Black world, is more critical to UK than Nigeria?

Conceit, hubris, blot out common sense — and our Mrs. Badenoch is living proof!

Still, a sweet takeaway!  “Bade” is a Nigerian name, even if the “Scottish” version “noch”s!  Too bad for Oyibokemi. There’s no Nigeria escape.  Talk of the Iroko “curse”!