By Babatope Falade-Onikoyi
Upon first glance, she looks like an ordinary girl. But that is what she needs to be to help ordinary people or appeal to them. Oluwakemi Olufunto Badenoch (Nee Adegoke) is the leader of the UK Conservative Party, and has held that position since November 2024.
This means she is a Prime Minister hopeful, and her politics moves farther than the right of old conservative and compromise politics that has permitted the woke agenda in Britain, just as in other Western countries.
Despite her fervor to reform British politics and culture, it is clear that her leadership engine is made from anything other than the British life stream. We argue that Kemi Badenoch’s leadership engine was forged, based on her experiences in Nigeria.
At the heart of Kemi’s political rhetoric, worldview, motivation and vision, lies the influence of events that happened in Nigeria. Think about it. Kemi coming to the United Kingdom at 16 years with her father’s last £100, and having to work at McDonald’s, despite coming from a family that could easily have afforded to send her to Stanford to study medicine, even when she got a scholarship as a child prodigy.
Coming from a family of traders, a medical doctor (General Practitioner) father and a mother that is a Professor of Physiology, Kemi noted that her “family had to work harder, while they got poorer”. This experience, summed in this paragraph is what we can call the basis of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership engine.
At this juncture, it is important to clarify the meanings of leadership engine and life stream, the former which was coined by us at Onikoyi Consulting and the latter is a product of Bruce Avolio’s publication, called; Leadership in Balance.
The leadership engine as a metaphor tries to capture the forces that drives the leadership style of any leader. These forces are developed overtime and now for a framework of mental tools from where the leader creates their vision and selects their responses to challenges. But like every engine, fabrication is critical. There can be no engine if there are no parts. But in the case of a leader, how do they develop their engine. This is where the lifestream concept comes in.
Lifestream in leadership development simply captures the various experiences and phases that leaders go through that evolves their mental models of how the world or events should be run. It also serves as their basis for working with people and creating vision.
We have briefly highlighted Kemi Badenoch’s lifestream in a previous paragraph, but there is more.
Kemi Badenoch’s Lifestream
The series of events and experience of Kemi Badenoch can be summarized into the following:
i) Great Expectations ii) Despair iii) Redemption v) Expansion.
1. Great Expectations
Kemi Badenoch as a child was aware about the economic fortunes of her family. She had a rich paternal grandmother who deployed her wealth to advance the education and material well being of her children. Then Kemi’s father- Femi Adegoke who is also a leader in an alternative Yoruba socio-political group was a commercially successful medical general practitioner in the 70’s till mid-80’s in Nigeria, according to an interview given by Kemi herself.
The world was literally for the taking for Kemi, just the basic expectation you would expect from a precocious child, born into privilege and certainty. But the great expectations will soon fall, but not like a House of Cards, but gradually. Soon, inflation crept up to the family’s finances. State enterprises began to fail, hence, basic amenities warmed up to become luxuries. Suddenly, the middle-class entitlement was shattered, and the family, just like many families till date was faced with multi-dimensional poverty, in spite of the level of education and professional capabilities of her parents, and extended family.
Kemi confirms that some of her family members are now abroad, though the reason was not explicitly stated. It is not uncommon to trace the economic hardships and slide of the 80’s to a wave of emigration that happened in Nigeria around that time.
Matters became worse, and a sudden realization of her family’s poverty will soon hit Kemi on the head like a rock-solid pillow. At 16 years, she was established as a straight-A’s student. She took the SAT’s and passed so much that she got a partial scholarship for Pre-Med school to Stanford University. Compared to the previous economic station of her family, this time the family could not even attempt to afford the other part of the fees.
Her father gathered all he had left, and that is 100. Kemi was a UK citizen, being born there, so she had her passport. Holding the 100 in her purse, and her passport clutched under her arms, the last thing Kemi saw was the look in her father’s face, the peremptory look of hope that she will at least make something out of life, compared to if she stayed back in Nigeria.
For a child everyone was confident will be a doctor, no one was now sure of what she will become. She was not sure either. But luckily, the United Kingdom- her other country offered the hope of something, but that also was not known. This ambiguous situation and the total lack certainty were typical of poor people that emigrate to foreign countries. Kemi Adegoke (at the time) was now properly a working-class citizen, and that is only if she made it to the United Kingdom and found her foot in due time.
In Nigeria, she was just a poor person, without benefits or any form of social insurance. Her great expectations were shattered. The question now was; can the United Kingdom help Oluwakemi Olufunto Adegoke dream again? That was a question of despair. The next stage is despair
2. Despair
When Kemi got to the United Kingdom at 16 years, she had to work. Though she had a place to stay, the bills demanded that she provide some of support for herself and “uncertain future ambition”. She started work at McDonalds and worked for 2 years, before she enrolled in an unnamed college.
During her studies for A-level, Kemi highlights what she calls, “Soft bigotry of low expectations”, recanting how she was discouraged from studying medicine. The climate there was permissive of reducing the educational goals and ambition she once had. She settled for Computer Engineering, where she bagged a Masters of Engineering from University of Sussex in 2003.
She has worked at Logica, an IT firm as a Software Engineer, Royal Bank of Scotland as a Systems Analyst, as a director of a financial services and wealth manager at Coutts and working as a digital director for the tabloid- The Spectator.
Now, Kemi had seemingly resolved the conflict of life by getting decent education in the United Kingdom, and became privileged to work in reputable organizations. But this did not stop her from bagging an LL. B in 2009, from Birkbeck, University of London.
However, just like every person that has ever been called leader, the basis of her leadership engine still persisted. And we can summarize is thus: “Middle-class families should not lose their wealth to inept government” This brief engine remains at the heart of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership development.
For a 16-year old the movement from privilege to poverty remained palpable until Kemi found answers. Those answers were found in books. Let’s call this phase of her lifestream- Redemption.
3) Redemption
According to Kemi, she found answers in Hayek’s “Road to
Serfdom”, Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell and The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. But most notably, the book with the greatest impression is that of Hayek’s which exhaustively and systemically decries socialism and centrally planned economies. His argument if summed concisely is, “Planned economies do not work”. This assertion showed Kemi the problem of Nigeria and she was sure no one should live like that. She jumps at every opportunity to reiterate this, including recently when she said; “so I have lived with the consequences of terrible governments that destroy lives, and I never, ever want it to happen here.” She was talking about Nigeria, and how she will ensure economic and socio-cultural decay does not destroy UK civilization.
Just like every mental model, there is a primary marker, and secondary marker. For Kemi, the economy is the primary marker, while other issues such as culture and social relations are also important as secondary marker. But she will find herself warming her way into the hearts of the British public through her position on issues such as gender relations, culture and immigration. Kemi found her voice as a member of British society, based on these subjects.
The world has now moved in a nationalistic fervor mode, where ethnicity, race, and aversion for multiculturalism dominates the political discourse and political process. All of these converged to favour Kemi’s ascension to the position of Conservative Leader. Being of Nigerian origins, where multiculturalism is contentious and charged, and negatively political nurtured her psyche and provided fuel for her strong views and convictions about how the United Kingdom should proceed.
Lacking in definite and decisive powers, Kemi, by virtue of the Westminster model has begun to make moves to snatch power from the Labour Party, after 14 years in power. Now, she is building on her new-found voice.
4. Expansion
Kemi recently announced that she will ensure that immigrants spend up 15 years to become British citizens. This according to her will help them maintain a natural connection to British values. People with fraudulent and criminal records will be entitled to become citizens.
While this appears to be borne of the desire to please the British public and earn their votes in a time when Reform UK is gaining some traction, it is actually based on Kemi’s firm conviction that she does not want her adopted country to become like her country of origin.
Kemi had seen the ills of unpurposed multiculturalism in Nigeria, and she can see how sub-cultures from various parts of the world are developing in the UK, threatening to dilute, or even exterminate British values. She genuinely believes this will lead to the situation in Nigeria where the society is composed with people of the same skin and build, but with different worldviews that are apposite to a firm socio-cultural fabric and development.
Conclusion
What we see here is that Kemi Badenoch did not arrive at her politics, life work and worldview by virtue of birth alone. These views were developed over the years, as a result of her experiences (life stream).
Leaders are often made for the moment in which the perform. Think of them as actors, who train and become appropriate for the role they have given.
Until his appointment as Prime Minister on May 13, 1940, Winston Churchill was considered a persona non grata because of his style in oratory and decision making. But he was the most suited to fight Adolf Hitler. He understood military matters better than any political elite at the time. He had the capacity for giving speeches to motivate the British public and his peers in the House of Commons.
Margaret Thatcher in the same vein was the daughter of a grocer who made it to Oxford. She saw first hand how her father managed his store and held his head up. This inspired the spirit of self-reliance in Margaret, providing her with the locus to fight socialism and collectivism that had engulfed Great Britain since the end of the Second World War.
Ultimately, leaders who do great things at scale are made by experiences as we have seen with the latter examples, as well as Kemi Badenoch.
