…Recount odds, struggle while growing up in Nigeria before migrating to London
*Lament: “After I was born by Nigerian parents in a private Catholic maternity in Wimbledon in January 1980, my mother, a physiology professor, and father, a GP, carried me back to Lagos State, where I spent my childhood under the shadow of military coups and the dictatorships, regimes that slowly eroded my family’s wealth, since we could hardly survive to make ends meet. We lived from hands to mouth”-KEMI
*BY YINKA ADAMOJU AKEJU/LONDON REPORTER, NAIJA STANDARD NEWSPAPER INC USA
Through her speech, body language, expression in public places, she is seen always in the Queen’s Enclave, as a woman who ‘abandoned’ her native land of heritage-Nigeria where her biological parents come from. Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch is her name, the Conservative Party Leader in the United Kingdom, UK. She recalled recently the struggles, tough times her entire family went through under the military administrations of Generals Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Badamasi Babandiga, IBB, and Sani Abacha, which eroded away her family’s wealth and resulted in them ‘almost begging to feed for survival.’
For the records, having won the bloc vote on November 2, 2024, Kemi Badenoch stood before a room of Conservative Party members in London and smiled as the results were read aloud, having defeated Robert Jenrick by 53,806 votes to 41,388, but the woman who had just become the first Black leader of a major British political party was already thinking about the long road that had put her there, a road that began in a private Catholic maternity hospital in Wimbledon in January 1980, where she was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke to Nigerian parents who had flown to Britain for specialized medical care.
Within months, her mother, a physiology professor, and her father, a GP, carried her back to Lagos, where she spent her childhood under the shadow of military coups and the dictatorships of Buhari, Babangida, and Abacha, regimes that slowly eroded her family’s wealth until, by the time she turned sixteen, they had very little at all. Her secondary school was a brutal institution that she has likened to a prison and to Lord of the Flies, where every girl carried a machete and a hoe to cut the grass, a survival-of-the-fittest environment that broke her rebellious spirit, dropped her grades, and left her trading meals for books.
She puts it in the following words: “After I was born by Nigerian parents in a private Catholic maternity in Wimbledon in January 1980, my mother, a physiology professor, and father, a GP, carried me back to Lagos State, where I spent my childhood under the shadow of military coups and the dictatorships, regimes that slowly eroded my family’s wealth, since we could hardly survive to make ends meet. We lived from hands to mouth”.
In 1996, with Nigeria in chaos and her mother’s salary going unpaid, her parents used her British passport like a golden ticket, sending her alone to London with just £100, where she supported herself by flipping burgers at a McDonald’s in Morden while studying for her A-levels. She worked her way through a computer systems engineering degree at the University of Sussex and later earned a law degree from Birkbeck, University of London, all while building a career as a systems analyst and eventually becoming an associate director at the private bank Coutts.
She joined the Conservative Party in 2005, ran and lost twice, but at a Dulwich and West Norwood Tory club meeting in 2009, she met a fellow activist named Hamish Badenoch, and by a twist of fate, they discovered they had both been born in the same Wimbledon hospital, St Teresa’s, exactly one year apart. He had a car, she did not, so he volunteered to drive her to meetings, and soon he helped her deliver leaflets and run her campaigns.
They married in September 2012 at Farm Street, a Catholic church in Mayfair, followed by a traditional Nigerian wedding in Lagos. Hamish had his own political ambitions, having stood for a seat in Northern Ireland where he won just 132 votes, but he stepped back from his own career to support her relentless climb. She has often said that picking your partner wisely is the best advice she can give to anyone entering politics, because he has been her rock, and she certainly would not be standing there without him.
Over the next decade, she became an MP in 2017, served as trade secretary and business secretary, and on that Saturday in November 2024, she made history. Just months later, she and Hamish attended a state banquet at Windsor Castle, a world away from the girl who once cut grass with a machete in a Nigerian military state, now standing as the Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, a testament to a journey she has walked every painful mile of.
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