The government of President Bola Tinubu has reacted to recent remarks made by UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch regarding her family’s struggles due to inflation in Nigeria.

Badenoch, during her first speech of the year at an event organised by Onward, a British think tank, lamented how inflation in Nigeria nearly pushed her family into poverty and led them to relocate to the United Kingdom when she was 16 years old.

She expressed concerns about the possibility of the UK governance system deteriorating like Nigeria’s ineffective governance and warned of the risks of Britain’s system failing and likened it to governance issues in Nigeria.

The Special Adviser to the President on Policy Communications, Daniel Bwala, dismissed her remark’s relevance to Nigeria’s international relations during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on Monday.

He said, “I don’t think it would have an effect because she’s not the government in power. Usually, these international relationships or collaborations are dealings between governments. Because she’s not the government in power, it will not have any effect.

“Secondly, because she’s a Nigerian, investors will be smart enough to access what she’s saying, whether it is born out of rhetoric.”

Although Bwala acknowledged Badenoch’s achievements in the UK, he argued that she is capitalising on populism that thrives on public discontent.

“The only problem we have with Kemi, I think, is the rhetoric because Kemi belongs to the right base in the United Kingdom, which is what you see in this populism around the world that you can deepen on your support system if you can feed off of the anger of the people.

“And so she’s building a rhetoric of denigrating Nigeria, demarketing in Nigeria, so she can probably win the acceptance or acceptation of the rights in her party. And that to me is counterproductive because if you look at Rishi Sunak, he is also of Indian origin.

“There has been this issue of gang rape in India. He has never used that as a weapon to promote what he believed to be a departure from what is likely to be believed as hereditary or history of the Indian people, but she has always denigrated Nigeria,” he said.