Counsellor | Speaking for fairness, growth & good governance
Bauchi, Nigeria
Joined May 2019
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Kemi "Olodo" Badenoch is a racial gatekeeping political prostitute celebrating Britainโs proceeds of historical injustice against Black people while dismissing the legitimate claims of those whose ancestors paid the price and still bear the brunt today.
Britain didn't abolish slavery. It went from kidnapping & human trafficking millions of Africans to enslaving entire nations of Africans then falsely claims it abolished slavery when Colonisation was Slavery 2.0.
Britainโs current discourse on โnot apologising and not paying reparationsโ for one of the gravest crimes against humanity is an indictment of its moral conscience, its historical honesty and its willingness to acknowledge the enduring consequences of wealth accumulated through the enslavement, exploitation and dehumanisation of millions of African people. It exposes the contradiction of a nation willing to celebrate the wealth, power and institutions built during its imperial expansion, yet reluctant to confront the human cost upon which so much of that prosperity was founded.
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This whole ILR discussion is why I will die on the hill that Nigeria NEEDS to work.
Japa is not, will not, will never be the solution
The countries you are fleeing to are becoming more hostile, hateful and openly racist everyday.
Thereโs no reason for anyone to be so condescending to black people like this, talmabout low skilled workers.
Your dad fr
Africa Needs to WORK
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There is something many young people moving abroad on student visas, particularly those hoping to build a permanent life overseas, do not fully understand until it is too late. When you are young, ambitious, energetic and full of dreams, moving to the UK, USA, Canada or Australia can feel like the beginning of a better life. You imagine completing your studies, securing a good job, becoming a permanent resident, eventually acquiring citizenship and settling down.
Unfortunately, immigration does not always work that way. A student visa is not a guarantee of permanent residence. It is temporary permission to live in a country primarily for the purpose of studying.
Once your studies and permitted stay end, you must either qualify for another immigration route or leave the country. Depending on the country, you may qualify for a post-study work visa, an employer-sponsored work visa or another lawful immigration category.
For instance, in the UK, an eligible employer can sponsor you for a Skilled Worker visa. This allows you to work legally and may eventually provide a pathway to permanent settlement, provided you continue meeting the relevant immigration requirements.
But here is where the real problem begins.
Getting admitted to a university abroad is one thing. Finding an employer willing and legally able to sponsor your stay afterwards is an entirely different battle. Universities will happily admit thousands of international students who can afford tuition fees. However, admission does not guarantee employment, sponsorship or permanent residence. And this is the reality many immigration agents, university recruiters and people selling the dream of life abroad rarely explain properly.
You can spend millions of shillings on tuition fees, accommodation, flights and living expenses, graduate with excellent academic qualifications and still find yourself unable to secure a job that allows you to remain in the country. You may have a masterโs degree from a prestigious university, years of professional experience and impressive academic credentials, yet discover that employers are unwilling to sponsor you, the salary requirements are too high or your profession no longer qualifies under the prevailing immigration rules.
What happens next?
Some graduates end up taking jobs completely unrelated to their qualifications, not necessarily because they lack ambition or ability, but because their immediate priority has changed from building a career to finding a lawful way to remain in the country. Others enrol for another course, pay more tuition fees and obtain another student visa, hoping that the extra time will eventually lead to an employment opportunity.
Before they realise it, what started as a promising educational journey has turned into years of trying to secure immigration status. And this is the part that genuinely concerns me.
Your twenties and thirties are not just years for chasing visas. They are important years for building a career, establishing financial security, starting a family, acquiring property and enjoying life. Imagine spending ten or fifteen years moving between temporary immigration arrangements, paying millions in fees, accepting jobs you never intended to do and living with the constant uncertainty of whether you will be allowed to remain in the country.
Your ability to plan your future becomes tied to immigration decisions, employer sponsorship, changing government policies and political debates in a country where you may not even have voting rights. Meanwhile, your friends back home may be progressing professionally, raising families, acquiring assets and establishing businesses. Of course, not everyone who studies abroad experiences this. Many international students succeed tremendously. They secure excellent jobs, become permanent residents and build fulfilling lives overseas. But we must also acknowledge those whose journeys turn out differently FOR THE VAST MAJORITYโฆ.
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If voting for the worst candidate doesnโt bother you because youโre planning to Japa, and you donโt care whether Nigeria works or not, read the comments.
The UK really wants to punish LEGAL immigrants. I came here paid ยฃ15k tuition fee +2.5k NHS.
Now im working, paid 1.5K for my visa fee, 2.5k NHS, this lasts me 2.5 years, next septemper i need to do another visa 2.5 years, same fee.
And you guys are blaming us claiming BENEFITS? WE ARE NOT ALLOWED to claim benefits.
And people dont even want to google it. What do you want, why dont you stop the boats but punishing us? We are staying here, working as professionals, paying taxes, visa fee, NHS๏ฟผ
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Voting underway in Iraqโฆ
Just kidding
This is Dearborn, Michigan.
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Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. โBibi calls Trump about it every day,โ says an informed observer.
Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last weekโs election results, he canโt form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war.
To that end, heโs applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war theyโve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahuโs lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha.
The rest of Americaโs longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They wonโt recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people.
And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.
Weโve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten Americaโs nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called โbattlefield nukesโ easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now weโre on the brink of it.
Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, heโs hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.
Theyโre right, though it wonโt be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances, and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making.
One group that hasnโt been consulted so far is the global population โ the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.
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โTinubu is working undergroundโ
Shey na underground I dey ๐ญ
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I hope you become a woman you feel safe being, not just a woman other people admire.
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I have always been fascinated by a particular breed of African politicians in Europe who seem to have made it their lifeโs ambition to be more British than the British, more French than the French, and more hostile to Africans and immigrants than the most rabid nationalists in their adopted political circles.
You find them in Britain, France, Belgium and across Europe, particularly in countries that once colonized Africa. Many are the children of African immigrants, sometimes the first generation born in Europe, whose parents arrived in those countries as foreigners. Yet their children have somehow developed an almost religious devotion to the most reactionary interpretations of European nationalism. They speak about immigration as though their own parents descended from the heavens with citizenship certificates in their hands.
And I am not talking about Africans who happen to be conservative. I am talking about those who appear determined to prove their loyalty to their political constituencies by expressing a degree of contempt for immigrants, Africans and their own ancestral history that would embarrass even some European conservatives. The irony would be hilarious if its consequences were not so serious.
Because these politicians occupy a particularly convenient position in the racial politics of Europe. Their African ancestry gives certain political movements an opportunity to present deeply contested positions on immigration, race and colonial history through someone whose very presence is then offered as proof that racism could not possibly be involved.
It is the political equivalent of the racist who insists that he cannot be racist because he once dated a Black woman. Except that this time, instead of producing a Black girlfriend, they produce a Black politician with an African surname and a spectacular appetite for defending their ideological prejudices.
What particularly disgusts me is the historical revisionism that sometimes accompanies this performance. Imagine being so desperate to demonstrate your European patriotism that you begin defending an imperial history whose victims included people who looked like your grandparents.
And for what? To prove that you are sufficiently British? Sufficiently French? That your African ancestry has been politically disinfected to the satisfaction of your audience? I find this obsession with proving oneself more authentically European than Europeans themselves intellectually fascinating and morally disturbing.
This is the context in which I examine Kemi Badenochโs politics. Badenoch is entitled to her conservative convictions, just as anyone else is entitled to challenge them. But her Nigerian heritage does not make her interpretation of British colonial history more credible, nor does it make her positions on race and immigration immune from criticism.
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Being honest about the whole history would also require being honest about how uniquely evil plantation slavery in the Americas was when compared to other systems of slavery. It also requires being honest about the fact that the abolition of slavery by Britain was followed by a brutal system of indentured labor in the Caribbean as well as colonialism in Africa which involved forced slave labor. Not to mention the fact that Britain was forced to abolition slavery much faster than originally planned due to pressure from slave revolts in the Caribbean, particularly the one lead by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica.
Those who insist in historical honesty really are just apologists for British colonialism who engage in the very selective reading of history that they complain about. Eric Williams explained that "British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it." In this version of history, Britain gets to be the savior that gets credit for ending slavery, but none of the blame for its involvement in centuries of slavery or the brutal system of colonialism which followed the end of slavery.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britainโs role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who donโt know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britainโs greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britainโs deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
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Every time we discuss European responsibility for the transatlantic slave trade, someone rushes to remind us that some Africans also sold enslaved people. We know that already. One historical fact does not cancel another. Stop using African complicity to erase European responsibi
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โWe were not allowed to speak Igbo in school. Our language was not spared. They tried to demonize our language and they came in different ways to destroy us as a race.โ - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I hate the dishonesty of Black people trying to vindicate their oppressor because they got basic amenities that the oppressor made sure their people never had.
Aunty Kemi, you said everyone participated in slavery and we should be honest about the whole history.
Then you quietly left out the most important part.
The so-called freedom was not freedom, it was payment. In 1833, Britain borrowed ยฃ20 million to compensate slave owners, around 40% of the national budget.
The enslaved received nothing. They were forced into "apprenticeships" of unpaid labour for years after. British taxpayers were still paying off that loan in 2015.
So when you say today's taxpayers should not be held responsible for what happened generations ago, they already were, for almost 200 years. The problem was never responsibility. It was who the money went to.
"Everyone participated" is a deflection. Yes, some African rulers and merchants took part, and that history should be told. But Britain built the ships, the insurance, the banks and the plantations, and wrote the laws that made human beings property. Participation is not equal responsibility, and you know that.
You mention Britain's leading role in ending the trade. Honest history also says abolition was forced by the resistance of the enslaved themselves, from Haiti to the Baptist War in Jamaica. It was not charity.
You say Blair already apologised. He expressed sorrow, and he did not apologise. That is exactly why the Caribbean is still asking.
And to say Commonwealth elites are looking for someone to blame is a lazy statement .
Debt, underdevelopment and broken systems did not appear from nowhere.
Many of these countries were designed to be extracted from, not to build.
Most of all, an oppressor cannot be the one to tell us when to stop talking about the evil they did. Caribbean nations are not asking you for permission. You can disagree with reparations, that is politics.
But as a British politician defending Britain's record, you are in no place to tell the descendants of the enslaved how much of their pain is too much, or when it is time to move on.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britainโs role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who donโt know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britainโs greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britainโs deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
๐ฎ๐๐ธ๐ธ๐๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ถ๐๐พ ๐ฆ retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britainโs role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who donโt know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britainโs greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britainโs deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
๐ฎ๐๐ธ๐ธ๐๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ถ๐๐พ ๐ฆ retweeted
I heard someone say.. "In your 30's you start to become who you were as a girl again, but you love her this time"
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You want a successful marriage, but you refuse to learn about marriage
Your partner suggests premarital counselling, and you say no.
Nobody can force you to participate, but please understand that love alone doesnโt automatically prepare you for the responsibilities of marriage