I find myself picturing an Africa, and Nigeria in particular, caught between two storms: a second Trump presidency in Washington and a hypothetical Badenoch premiership in London. Both cast themselves as populists, both speak the language of borders and “common sense,” and both have made clear where they stand on people who come from places like Nigeria. The thought is not comforting.
Donald Trump never pretended to love immigrants from the so-called third world. He froze foreign aid that kept HIV, TB and malaria programs alive, and tightened immigration rules so sharply that over 100 Nigerians were reported deported in a single recent sweep. Even where policy might be defended on technical grounds, the tone betrayed something deeper: a rhetoric that could not contain its own anger, an emotional posture that made allies uneasy and opponents certain that contempt was the point.
Like Trump, Kemi Badenoch has chosen a similar register, but with a sharper edge because the target is the country that made her. Over the last two years, the UK Conservative leader has turned Nigeria into a recurring prop in her political story. In a July 2025 CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria, she called Nigerian citizenship “virtually impossible” to obtain, claimed that as a Nigerian woman she could not pass it to her children, and held this up against Britain’s comparatively open path to naturalization as evidence that the UK needed to stop being “naive.” The claim detonated in Abuja. Presidential aide Dada Olusegun accused her of a “dangerous and desperate attempt to malign Nigeria,” while human rights lawyer Femi Falana called it “utter ignorance,” pointing to Section 25 of the 1999 Constitution, which grants citizenship by descent through either parent.
Badenoch did not stop there. She warned against letting immigrants build a “mini-Nigeria” in Britain and promised to make British citizenship much harder. Months later, on the Rosebud podcast, she said she was Nigerian “by ancestry, by birth,” but “by identity I’m not really,” adding that she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in 20 years. Abike Dabiri-Erewa and Nigerian-born Dutch entrepreneur Dr. Wiebe Boer called the remarks dismissive and self-erasing.
The distancing grew more pointed in late 2024. Speaking to The Spectator, Badenoch said she identified more with her Yoruba ethnicity than with Nigeria as a whole, and that she had “nothing in common” with people from Northern Nigeria, which she described as a haven for Islamism and Boko Haram. Vice President Kashim Shettima responded that she could “remove Kemi from her name” if she wished to disown the “greatest black nation on earth.”
She has also called Nigeria a “living hell,” recalled fetching water as a child and taps that spat out lizards, likened UK energy policy to 1980s military dictatorships, and described her time at Federal Government Girls College, Sagamu as “prison-like.” Critics read a pattern: a narrative of a broken homeland deployed to prove her credibility to a British conservative base. Badenoch insists the opposite, that her harshness comes from memory, from growing up in a resource-rich but poorly governed place, and from a determination that Britain must not slide down the same path.
That logic returned with force in July 2026. Media reports quoted her urging the Labor government not to abandon its plan to extend the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to ten years. In a letter co-signed with Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, Badenoch argued that migrants on temporary work visas who “fail to make a significant contribution” should go home at the end of their visa, not be allowed to settle permanently. She warned that a U-turn would “unleash huge increases in benefits claims” and that many of the jobs migrants fill are “low wage, low skilled” and could be done by Britain’s 9 million economically inactive citizens. The message was blunt: economic worth should determine belonging.
But what is economic worth, and who gets to measure it? Here is where theory pushes back against slogans. Classical economics has long understood that no economy survives on high earners alone. Adam Smith’s division of labor, and later John Maynard Keynes’ circular flow of income, show that prosperity depends on cleaners as much as consultants, on drivers as much as developers. A hospital cannot function without porters, a city cannot run without bus drivers, and no tech firm scales without retail and logistics workers who earn modest wages. Income is not the same as indispensability.
Sociologists Nancy Fraser and Marilyn Waring go further, arguing that GDP systematically ignores social reproduction. Children, the elderly, caregivers, and students do not appear on tax rolls, yet their unpaid labor is what makes paid labor possible. If caregivers stopped tomorrow, the formal economy would stall within days. Economist Gary Becker’s human capital theory adds the dimension of time: a child who contributes nothing today is an investment that becomes a taxpayer for 30 years. Even consumption matters. Keynes reminded us that every pound spent by anyone, regardless of status, becomes someone else’s income. The multiplier effect means that even the poorest consumer keeps a market alive.
Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach warns of the ethical cost of reducing people to a spreadsheet. A society that values only immediate fiscal contributions risks a dangerous logic of exclusion, in which dignity, care, and community are treated as externalities. This is not abstract. In Nigeria’s informal economy, much contribution is never captured in statistics: the hustle, the remittance spent in a local market, the shared food, the barter. In prisons, in IDP camps, among the very young and very old, people still create demand, still anchor families, still hold potential.
Badenoch is not wrong to ask hard questions. Should temporary visas automatically lead to settlement? Should governments protect public finances? Canada, Australia and New Zealand already weigh economic contribution in residency decisions. But the weakness lies in equating “low-paid” with “low-value.” A care worker may earn little and yet save the state vast sums in healthcare. A migrant in a job Britons do not take may be filling a structural gap caused by demographics, geography, or working conditions, not laziness. To call that insignificant is to mistake price for value.
The twin specters of Trump and Badenoch matter for Nigeria not because they will dictate policy in Abuja, but because they shape how Nigerians are seen abroad and how that perception filters back into trade, aid, and migration. If contribution is measured only by salary and tax, then entire categories of people become disposable: the student, the carer, the new arrival sweeping floors, the consumer buying bread.
No group contributes nothing. As consumers we sustain demand. As carers we reproduce the workforce. As future workers we embody investment. As community members we create the stability on which markets depend. The better question, then, is not who fails Badenoch’s test of “significant economic contribution.” It is how we design economies and immigration systems that recognize contribution in all its forms, paid and unpaid, immediate and deferred, fiscal and human. Otherwise we build a politics that celebrates productivity while quietly dismantling the people who make it possible.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
