Kemi, a few decades ago, the British owned us and stole us blind. Who could have thought the gods would choose one of our young women to go to England to lord over the masters of our grandfathers? Our pastors started the payback, taking Christianity back to the sons of the missionaries. But some said our pastors only came to lie down in green pasture.

Others said our pastors were dancing on an abandoned stage, littering an increasingly irreligious kingdom with noisy black churches while their Nigeria succumbed to the torture of sin. Kemi, you didn’t come to play monkey post. You took the white bull by the horns with your black hands, and many whose ancestors had bought the dark-skinned as chattel bowed at your feet with their votes.   Recently, when I watched you grilling the Prime Minister in your long braids at a PM Question Time, I was dizzy with pride. Our great grandfathers should have been alive.

Of all parties, you chose the whitest to impose your blackness. History says only three women, all white, had been found worthy. Now, you, black, a first-generation immigrant, have ruined the record books with your audacity. Since all the other three had all, at some point, become prime ministers, we have started sewing our asoebi. Ours can’t be different. Idi Amin loved to call himself the Conqueror of the British Empire. Now, a full-blooded Nigerian woman who participated in ‘Up NEPA’  and survived ‘Wetin you carry’ in childhood is living the wildest dream of the delusional Ugandan Field Marshall. Oluwakemi, your name bears witness to your divinity. The heathen can rage; you are a goddess. 

Our people say long sermons are not for evening services. You must have heard Kashim Shettima, who should have attained the zenith of common sense and banked away a wealth of diplomacy. You must have heard him excoriate you for expressing an honest opinion about Nigeria. That’s the prevalent attitude; protesters are now treated as coup plotters. Please, ignore him. Did you hear him say that even if you dropped Kemi from your name, it wouldn’t stop Nigeria from being the third most populous nation in the world by 1950? Did you catch a glimpse of their priorities? But what was that about?

Was he insinuating that you defected from a potentially big country to a diminishing small one? The small country where our small-minded leaders go to seek medical care and spend their holidays? That is the same man who called your first cousin, Prof Osinbajo, an ice cream man when your cousin was the vice president. Pardon him because he loses circumspection when he mimics Martin Luther King. That innuendo that politics isn’t for the benign and guileless but perhaps should be for the coarse and knavish and hypocritical is, unfortunately, valid for our country. But see how quickly and high a young and decent lady has climbed His Majesty’s political ladder, unaided. 

Kemi, I’m not writing to incite you. I don’t want you to go washing the linen of Shettima and his boss before King Charles and his people. If you do that, the sheepish breed of progressives we have here will accuse you of scaring away foreign investors from your fatherland. Some have said you have a penchant for trashing Nigeria to enhance your superficial Britishness. A bit like those UNILAG girls who get to the Akoka campus and cannot show anyone the pictures of the mothers in the village and are willing to disown them if they ever set foot on campus unannounced.

But your detractors won’t notice the vice president of their broke country telling the world that breeding wantonly is greatness. They don’t know that the rain that beats an eagle baths it. Part of the problem is envy. Those who are trying to shake an Iroko are only shaking themselves. Let them continue to brag about population. They won’t understand how a rich man who opted for two children feels when a poor man comes begging for a loan for the baby milk of his tenth child. 

However, Kemi, help to unite this country as you are helping the United Kingdom. Since you are the opposition leader, you can teach the opposition in Nigeria on how to galvanise themselves in a government-in-waiting. Rather than jumping ship promiscuously to the ruling party like economic migrants or running around at night like the easy women at Takwa Bay looking out for the wink of a sailor, they should sit still and build the opposition. Our political parties are indeed anything but vehicles for change and development. They are one-chance gas-guzzling bolekajas driven by egotistical people with ravenous appetites. But if you devote some time to mentoring young ladies in politics here,  you would be doing the Lord’s work. 

Shettima is not the problem. Tinubu chose him on merit but has left him in the boot like a deflated spare tyre. Anytime he gets an opportunity, he seeks to impress his boss. But like a tyre with defective alignment, his effort only leads to wear and tear. Our government is reforming the economy, but evidently, it has no population control policy. It can’t be the fault of the relegated and redundant big man. The population is growing faster than the economy, and the government doesn’t see the danger.

Nevertheless, Kemi, you must always tell the world you were raised in Nigeria. While growing up here, you were an average kid. Had evil  Abacha not happened, you might have stayed. Given the opportunity, thousands of kids in Nigeria can rule the world like you. So, tell them that harnessing the Nigerian youth could be more valuable than drilling crude oil in the Delta or scavenging for lithium in the North. I know it could be risky for you to market the Nigerian youth as the leader of the conservative party while many princes are spamming the kingdom with Yahoo-Yahoo letters.  But you are the evidence of whom we are. 

Abike Dabiri thinks you are snobbish. As the head of the Diaspora Commission, she had tried to reach out, but you avoided her. If it won’t hurt your chances of becoming prime minister, please grant her audience. Blood is thicker than water. But I agree; you can’t reduce yourself to a PR machine for a bumbling regime. These guys who call you all kinds of names probably think you rose to the top of the conservative party of the UK rapidly by doing notice-me Nigerian patriotism and carrying ‘black lives matter’ on your head. They don’t understand. Some think you sold your birthright like Esau, so they call you Uncle Tom. Just because you said honest things about past religious intolerance and general insecurity in Nigeria. Perhaps they have forgotten that you witnessed Akaluka. They want to turn you into their international laundry woman. Kemi, ‘no gree for anybody’ .

When they heard you say that there was no need for reparation because colonialism brought a mix of good and bad things, they cringed and cursed. They don’t understand that people are created with different sentiments. I disagree with you because I think colonialism was a ruthless commercial expedition, the Bible notwithstanding.  Whatever good it brought was accidental to the furtherance of wanton exploitation and cruel subjugation. But I understand your point of view and won’t denigrate it as the political hustle of a black woman seeking white approval. I remember you also said that our colonial masters only displaced native oppressors.

So in effect the ordinary people didn’t suffer from colonialism. While I disagree with your assertion that our people essentially had no rights before that white man came, as if we had no civilisation at all, I know that after independence, native oppressors took their place to treat our people like animals. But you didn’t have to go to the extent of calling reparations a scam. You know our situation. They plundered us and stole our art, too. I know it could be one of those hyperbolic expressions, the kind of thing politicians give to their bases to excite them.

But I was worried that it could make you appear inauthentic. I have told many people who believe that Mr Badenoch has whitened your mind to mind their business. Can’t they imagine that it could be your innate preference for all things British that made you choose him instead of all the Yoruba bachelors in Peckham searching desperately for real wives? Now, even people who have never left the shores of Nigeria but dislike fufu and love Quaker oats and use bleaching creams are amongst those dissing you, calling you a white supremacist in black skin.

Kemi, I am writing to congratulate you on your outstanding feat, not to judge you. You are a conservative. Your strong positions on transgenderism and other wokeisms are commendable. The thing is spiralling out of control. I’m not sure many of your traducers in Nigeria know you have fought against men having access to female bathrooms and locker rooms and other such ideas. I’m proud of you. You were elected into the parliament only seven years ago, and now you are a prime minister in waiting.

Had you stayed back here like many of your primary and secondary school classmates, you would have finished NYSC in the early 2000s somewhere in Katsina or Maiduguri and possibly joined the AD or PDP to understudy Adedibu. Without a godfather, you would never have won any party primaries in the AD or PDP. Soon you will be Prime Minister of the UK. Had you stayed back, you might have been socialised into their cash-and-carry politics, attending regular night meetings like a witch or mutated into a red-eyed social critic barking at the wrong trees. But you made the right choice. You eloped to England and studied hard, including engineering and law. Married your friend Mr Hamish Badenoch without bothering about his race and raised a happy family of three beautiful children. That’s not bad at all, Mrs Badenoch. 

My prayer is that someday we can call you Madam Prime Minister. And you will be our ‘Josephine’ .