Dada Olusegun, a top aide to the Nigerian president, has strongly criticized UK Conservative leader and Business Secretary, Kemi Badenoch, for her comments about Nigerian citizenship. He said she gave the wrong information about how citizenship works in Nigeria.
In a recent CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria, Kemi Badenoch said that Nigerian women cannot pass their citizenship to their children. She used this to compare how easily people can get British citizenship compared to Nigeria’s process.
“It’s virtually impossible, for example, to get Nigerian citizenship. I have that citizenship by virtue of my parents. I can’t give it to my children because I’m a woman. Yet loads of Nigerians come to the UK and acquire British citizenship. We need to stop being naive.”she said
Reacting on his X (formerly Twitter) page, Olusegun accused Badenoch of spreading false information and trying to make Nigeria look bad to the international community.
He wrote
“Aunty @KemiBadenoch, why do you continue to lie against your motherland? Why this continuous, dangerous, and desperate attempt to malign Nigeria?”
Olusegun pointed to Nigeria’s Constitution, saying Section 25(1)(c) of the 1999 Constitution clearly shows that any child born outside Nigeria can still be Nigerian by birth if either parent is Nigerian—whether it’s the mother or the father.
“This holds regardless of the father’s nationality. You do not need to apply for registration or naturalisation for her child to be a citizen,” he added.
Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK to Nigerian parents and spent part of her early years in Lagos before moving back to the UK at age 16. She is now married to a Scottish man and has three children.
According to Nigerian law, a child can get Nigerian citizenship from either the mother or father if the parent is Nigerian by birth. Gender only matters when it comes to foreign spouses, where the law favors foreign women married to Nigerian men more than it does foreign men married to Nigerian women.
Section 26(2)(a) of the Nigerian Constitution allows foreign women married to Nigerian men to apply for citizenship through registration. But the same does not apply to foreign men married to Nigerian women.
However, this rule only applies to spouses. For children, the law is clear—they can get citizenship from either parent without any gender preference, as long as the parent is Nigerian by birth.
