Kemi Badenoch and the HIV paradox, by Dr Dele Afelumo
Mrs Olufemi Olufunto Badenoch became the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party when she outpolled her rival, Robert Jenrick on November 2nd 2024. It was a seismic shift whose effects reverberated throughout the whole world, especially Nigeria, her ancestral country.
Nigerians from all walks of life felicitated her historic navigation of one of the most labyrinthine pathways in world politics which hitherto, unapologetically, was an exclusive preserve of the all-white populace to walk. It was a similitude of a proverbial horse entering the eye of a needle.
Her forerunner in the demolition of that atavistic bastion was Rishi Sunak, the immediate erstwhile UK Prime Minister who has Kenya, Uganda and India ancestral roots.
At the inchoate stage of her political expedition, an innocent, neophyte Kemi Badenoch begged her Nigerian compatriots in Dulwich and West Norwood to vote for her so as to represent their interests.
Hear Kemi Badenoch speak to her Nigerian audience in 2010 “As you know, I’m running for Parliament in the 2010 UK general elections for Dulwich and West Norwood. The race is very tight….. There are about 20 days to go before polling day and Nigerians have been fantastic.
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My immediate circle of friends, ex-school mates, their friends and all our families have really rallied round and have been supportive”. Little did the Nigerians supporting her then know they were dealing with ‘one chance’ and ‘Gbajue’ of a character.
She was overwhelmingly voted for and just like the Phoenix, she rose from the ashes to her present Olympian height. There is this unholy nexus between Kemi and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus that is luculent but funnily ineffable.
Although HIV had been with us since the late 19th century and early 20th century as a docile, weak virus, by the first quarter of 1980, it assailed our world with insensate ferocity and the world has not remained the same since then. Coincidentally, Kemi Adegoke too, was born on the second day of January 1980.
HIV, after transmogrification into AIDS in some patients has since then sent many hapless souls to their early graves. Just the same way the indolent virus took over the whole body’s Physiology by storm, embedded itself sturdily into its host and turned it to Pathology after deceiving the body receptors initially that it only wanted to enhance better bodily functions, Kemi took the whole establishment of the UK by storm in her meteoric rise to stardom.
Having hogged the limelight by one-upping her British and Nigerian bases in the UK, she has now turned to a rebellious, firebrand renegade leaving her loyal compatriots in the lurch with their mouths wide agape. She made some sterling promises to her undiscerning loyal Nigerian voters then.
Hear Kemi again: “Like you, I am sick and tired of reading that Nigerians are fraudsters, terrorists, bombing airplanes or slaughtering each other in places like Jos. Our generation has suffered enough from the mistakes of the past and it is up to us not to repeat them. So, I am asking for your help now to support a Nigerian who is trying to improve our national image and do something great here.
This is a chance to have someone who has real influence over what is going on with British-Nigerian relationships. It will not be about personal gain”. Such a metamorphosis from once-innocent, pragmatic character to a wily fox rubbishing the very foundation of Nigeria she deceptively promised to preserve these days!
It is obvious that Kemi is grappling with four main issues which are also common with HIV in its dastardly assault on our bodily functions. Firstly, both are guilty of pseudologia fantastica which in medical parlance is called mythomania. Kemi Badenoch which some people have satirically morphed and corrupted into *Kemi Bad-enough*, compulsive mendacities trail her every step.
As HIV lies to the hosts’ bodies and doctors managing HIV patients every time by becoming neo-hybrid variants deadlier than the original forms—even after the administration of some thoroughly researched drugs showed some promise to stop it from assailing its hosts through replication and mutation—so is Kemi compulsively lying about her years in Nigeria and the hellish terrain she traversed there before God pulled her to her present paradisiacal ambience.
Oh! Lest I forget, she presently is an atheist but just a nominal, cultural Christian. So, leaving hell to paradise must have been by some sheer luck devoid of any testamentary Godism. Similarly, as HIV selfishly takes over the bodily nutrition of its hosts, becomes a rotundly flourishing and burgeoning behemoth ravaging that host until it becomes a cachectically walking corpse, HIV still lies to all undiscerning brigades that it is imprisoned by that host.
Such an ingratitude! In fact, ingratitude kills more than a bottle of poison, so says an adage. Flee, when next you meet a mythomaniac. She calls day, night in her flight of fancy and perfunctorily insults the sensitivities and sensibilities of her benevolent ancestral compatriots.
She spews folderols and puerile narratives with uncanny arrogance and sartorial regality to satisfy the bestial egos of her adopted paymasters. The Prime Minister in-waiting genuflects between fluid superfluities and grammatical excoriations with gruesome glee in utter reverence of her new countrymen.
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The next thing left for Kemi to show her Britishness is to go to a beautician and thoroughly bleach her skin so as to be white as snow! Hers is an oily veneer of excessive obsequiousness to the British society, slathered over a contemptuous arrogance to her Nigerian roots.
Little does Kemi know that no matter how British she prays to become, condescending and patronising attitudes of her overlords will continue to assail her sinews, viscera and pathways.
Secondly, Kemi and HIV are unabashed hauteurs of their neo-cultural accoutrements and appurtenances while they stridently attempt to treat their filial cultural affiliations with disdain and may even want to bury them with psychotic relish! Such fellows are only cheerleaders of wannabeism while stripping off all the relics of their forebears’ culture.
This is oikophobia at its best. Fetching water, kowtowing to elders and being herded into a hostel to be fully rooted in some African mores and norms to shape their future positively are more of punishments to Kemi.
While HIV extricates its own cultural values from its original genomes and completely assimilates those of the hosts, so is our Kemi ashamed of her Nigerianness and and is now more Catholic than the Pope and ‘out-englishing’ the English.
What an egregious malady! In essence, her British tiger now does not only pronounce her tigritude, but pounces with sheer braggadocio. How else could a spoilt brat have defecated on her father’s grave and pointed to his house with her left fingers? Onomastic puritanism, dignity and honour are what every African wants to always preserve and venerate in the comity of nations but the wog and wannabe takes ghoulish delight in tawdriness through her relentless scurrilous claims which have a symphonic range of disapprobation.
Some of Kemi’s contemporaries doing those chores then are now avatars in their different fields and have suffused our space with a litany of their achievements worldwide. Today, they are happy that they passed through the precincts of that school in Sagamu just as the school passed through them.
Thirdly, inferiority complex will always make a servile and unctuous myrmidon to be perennially subservient to her masters’ whims and caprices in order to curry their favours; get a sense of belonging in the innermost holy of holies with a bold moniker of ‘Awaiting PM’ to flaunt with gusto.
She spews gibberish and denigration of Nigeria with uncommon élan to the chagrin of many neoliberal elitists. It amounts to political legerdemains with unparalleled flatulence to obfuscate facts and distort history just because you want to permeate the inner sanctuary of the UK politics while vociferously rubbishing your ancestral heritage with sheer aplomb.
It is indeed surreal, to say the least. Our wannabe has only been entrapped in the vortex of a cunningly- choreographed British racket with comic sequels in years to come. Also, HIV feels inferior to its hosts as it makes its creeping incursion into all his bodily processes and mortally glues to the genomes of its hosts to affirm its amalgamation thereby reducing its inferiority complexes, but which nonetheless, remain a wide gulf in the host-parasite relationship.
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As her Philistinism in attempts to demarket Nigeria is stark, so is the frenzy of her nicodemous dalliance with our forebears’ oppressors who, under the aegis of civilizing missions herded our shackled progenitors as slaves to build their own countries and burnish their social standings while also shoring up their economic revenues through forced labour.
Those who are ahistorical of the past will always live to regret their present. Any river that forgets its source will soon dry up. It’s incumbent upon Kemi who is not blinded and blighted by political expediency to use her present position to say to the mutant past that it was a beast of circumstance and all attempts should be focused on permanently preventing that mutant past from rearing its ugly head in our present.
Kemi’s revisionist allegories are a maelstrom of half-truths and bare-faced mendacities in a desperate attempt to win over the serpentine nest of offspring of our supremacists of yesteryears. Her tales by moonlight are not only warped but are incongruous with realities and vitiated by the lacunae in her make-believe fantasies and fictions.
Only putrid excrescences flow from the tureen of such a self-indulgent soul as Kemi’s and so, it’s best to rationalise her egregious assaults as coming from someone in dire need of help.
Fourthly, histrionic characters always have these compulsive and inordinate interests in being in the news at all times—whether they do so for good or bad reasons does not matter to them.
As HIV has enjoyed the screaming headlines all over the world since 1980, relative to other viruses or diseases, our awaiting Prime Minister also cavorts to any podcasts, newsreels and other media outlets to flaunt her Britishness and political trajectories unblinkingly.
She wants her interviewers to see her brazenness in dexterity; coarseness in language and vulgarism in her outspokenness with contemptuous arrogance that will be an envy of the British society.
So corrosive and caustic is her unbridled tongue that she’s unconcerned about any backlash that may attend her desperate attention- and sympathy-seeking drivels. Every word she utters to condemn her country is an anodyne to her thirsty soul while desperately craving attention at every twist and turn.
Betrayals often stem from inordinate ambition, greed, manipulation of trust and perceived slights. Kemi’s churlish betrayal of Nigeria is reminiscent of Macbeth’s betrayal of King Duncan whom he murdered as King when goaded by his wife and manipulated by witches’ prophesies in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Kemi Badenoch does not care if no single black man migrates to the UK again as long as she shouts herself hoarse to support tightening the noose around the necks of all who genuinely want to come to the UK to eke out a living. Unknown to Kemi, no amount of relaxation of immigration rules to allow immigrants into the UK could atone for the sins of slavery of yesteryears or reparations for our stolen artefacts.
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Selling one’s historic heritage to curry favours for political patronage is a height of sacrilege. Hers is akin to bombing the bridge she once climbed to stardom so that no one else could dream of crossing over the bridge after her.
Hers is to show her British hegemonists that she has totally severed her umbilical cord with Nigeria so as to be offered the golden sceptre and royal diadem and driven to number 10 Downing Street in Rolls Royce with white supremacists falling in droves and paying her obeisance.
The self-conceited braggart is being blinded by ambition and giving herself a pat on the back for smothering the image of Nigeria, leaving it in tatters while she is daily being chauffeur-driven to her dream PM’s office and residence on red carpets with chants of ‘all hail the first black PM’ renting the air.
Kemi Badenoch is now the archetypal Norwegian Vidkun Quisling who collaborated with Nazi Germany in the second world war against the interests of his country, Norway. How the whirligig of ambition-betrayal gyrates to Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch’s favour in future years will be a case study in contemporary world history.
But one thing is clearly apparent: there is cognitive dissonance in the manners this pulchritudinous lady has comported herself since she got the reins of leadership of the Conservative Party in the last ten months. For now, we can only wish her luck in her desperate quest to be an occupant of Number 10 Downing Street.
Dr Dele Afelumo is a physician, compelling essayist, poet and writer.
For replies to the article, readers can reach the author via: drdeleafelumo98@gmail.com
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