Not sure you’re familiar with the phrase ‘going full Nigerian’, but that’s probably because I made it up a decade and a half ago.
My buddy and I were going to try and shake down an Indian guy at Absa in Johannesburg City. We were early, so I suggested we take our business plan and go and wait at a chicken shop owned by a Nigerian guy I knew called Dezi.
I had met him in the early 2000s when he was a bouncer in Midrand. The years ahead would be kind and reward his work ethic. By 2010 he owned three restaurants, a jeweller’s shop and a nightclub. He was a sharp dresser too. When we walked in, he was sitting in a booth alone, with a stand-over man standing by. Dezi wore sunglasses and a maroon suit. On the hand he waved, beckoning us towards him, every finger featured a ring.
When two other white guys walked in, they went toward the table. One wore a police uniform. The plainclothes cop obviously knew him and smiled: “Mr Dezi, hullo.”
Dezi wouldn’t let me and my friend leave, so we all squeezed together in the booth. Being resigned to the awkward situation, the plainclothes cop started.
“Look, Mr Dezi, we need to talk about your kitchen grill staff member, Sifiso. He’s in hospital from yesterday.”
“Shame for heem,” Dezi said, totally relaxed. The cop continued.
“Now look, we know about the cash being stolen from the register at Jeppestown (the site of Dezi’s other restaurant). That happens, now Sifiso is in hospital with very bad assault? What is going on?”
“Ahhh don’ know,” Dezi said breezily. “Am thinking myself: es rilly rilly strange.”
Then the uniformed officer came in: “Ja, Dezi, that’s what we’re trying to understand. Theft, then assault. Coincidence?”
“Soooch a fokke”
“Ay ay ay,” Dezi said, shaking his head before raising his voice at the officers: “BOT AHH TELL YOOOO WON THEENG…if a mun he steal, then a mun he get a hospital, well, life…es…life ees soooch a fokke.”
Dezi and his thugs had totally beaten that guy Sifiso, but his response was so outrageous that it was actually convincing. One of the policemen nodded. After they left, Dezi started quizzing my friend about a racehorse he owned. “Maybe ah also buy horse,” he thought out loud, looking away.
The impunity stayed with me. Even my unflappable friend concurred later: these people are ridiculously gifted.
So, I was quite happy when Olukemi Olufunto ‘Kemi’ Adegoke Badenoch, or Kemi Badenoch, was elected leader of Britain’s Conservatives a year and a half ago: not because she would sort that party out and make it electable again, but because we might get to see some full Nigerian, or at least fragments of.
Her problem, I felt, was too acute. The one-nation caucus is the largest and most influential in the Conservative party, and these are ultra-luxury belief connoisseurs. Saving the party would involve isolating, exposing, ridiculing one-nation. Given the landscape around her: the fact that all other major parties also boasted so many personalities who believed in scams like BLM; were developing an obsession with the economy-annihilating net zero (compressed through the twitching sphincter of her predecessor Theresa May’s dying administration), loved the Boris-wave of unfettered migration and its role suppressing the wages of Great Britain’s white working class, and lived knee-deep in Pride, I believed that a purge, whilst essential to the party’s fortunes, was impossible.
I was partially wrong.
Tirade
A few months ago, Kemi unchained herself in Parliament with a tirade against the slippery former Health Secretary, Wes Streeting: one of Peter Mandelson’s creatures. (Both Wes and Peter are gay, signing off with kisses their little WhatsApp correspondence, invariably wishing hell upon the party they are both members of.) At .54 seconds, you can see for yourself the look Kemi gives Wes.
Some weeks later Kemi was back in Parliament with an attack on Labour’s inept Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, whom she called a “spiteful class warrior”. Immediately afterwards, commentators claimed that Bridget and her colleague Liz Kendall, Secretary for Technology, were scouring the building for Kemi, demanding an apology for the insult. Here I hoped Kemi would adopt the most Nigerian of defence strategies ever, by reporting them to top brass before they got to her. “Mr. Speaker, quick, I’m being tailed by two white bitches, I think they’re trying to call me a cheeky maid or something.”
These events appeared with related purpose. Last week Kemi announced that she would indeed purge the party of its one-nation personalities. This week, she claimed her first scalp: the insufferable Gavin Barwell, former Chief of Staff to Theresa May.
Gavin looks like a hamster, or more politely, a badger with a dark secret. He’s a big human-rights and net-zero guy who should never have been a Conservative. Every stupid remark he makes is identical to every stupid remark Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey makes. On Tuesday Kemi had finally had enough, stripping the menace from his whip.
The party’s response to Gavin’s sacking revealed just how sick it is. Since when did Conservatives start sucking their teeth because tampons get sold in the ‘feminine hygiene’ section of Tesco? How is it that an elderly white Conservative MP volunteers to join a parliamentary committee exploring just how much Caribbean nations can score off Great Britain because of ‘slavery’? And when a young climate terrorist is charged with threatening the safety of road users by hanging on a gantry, why does a Conservative MP attend her sentencing in support? Because they both went to private school?
Bright
This is what a mostly sensible, bright young black woman of Yoruba heritage is up against: a new establishment of older men and women who are so anti-racist that they’ve become toxic racists, and who’ve conserved nothing but the cross-party routine of annoyance. She wants them replaced by builders, doctors and teachers. It is a righteous call.
Because at the heart of establishment, normal politics lies a sinister fact few dare confront: its adherents do not possess the ability to be original, and thus seek validation and examples – even meaning – from their own kind. This explains why establishment politicians in Canberra are clones of establishment politicians in Dublin’s Dáil Éireann – who are clones of Toronto’s class. Ask Ed Davey who his ‘favourite politician’ is and he says ‘Mark Carney’; ask Mark Carney who his ‘favourite politician’ is, and he’ll likely say ‘Ed Davey’.
A decade ago, few would have imagined that the task of straightening out English conservatism would fall to a woman of a materially different profile. She was dealt the worst hand imaginable, with the result that she can’t save those people from themselves. But trying to save everyone else, including her party’s brand, is the policy she’ll go for.
I still don’t think it can be done to the necessary extent. I hope I’m wrong again.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/conservativeparty/54283238178]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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