“I have been a foreigner all my life”—not that I talk about it much. As a result, I am deeply interested in displacement, how we've come to be understood as "foreign," and a longing to belong or the choices we make in response to being seen and treated as "foreign."

We do belong, just not here.

So how do we respond to this displacement? Is this choice made for ourselves and by ourselves, or must we account for others? One part of me, the part that anxiously and jealously guards my comfortable and stable life in the Global North, wants to say no, mainly because I fear jeopardizing my comfort for potential discomfort. Consider an international student's desire to protest injustice but knowing an arrest means a permanent mark affecting migration prospects.

The other, bigger part, recognises that the life I live would be impossible without others—friends, mentors, teachers, colleagues, family and an assortment of pets—who have willingly poured love, money and time into me. They supported me, so I pay it forward.

I am a person who doesn't like seeing others suffer, and dreams of a society that mitigates suffering. Yet, that part of me—the Gollum who likes being comfortable—reminds me that I could play the game differently. My worry isn't knowing the lengths I'll go to secure comfort, but acknowledging I've already begun walking that path. I fear the pleasure found in exercising power, especially when I benefit from it, even more so that I'd be good at it.

Instead of therapy, I studied how others navigate belonging as diaspora members. Belonging isn't just a feeling but an ongoing practice under constraint. The challenge is structural: power requires distance from our communities, assimilation buys credibility, and disavowal becomes currency. And so choices must be made.

Enter Kemi Badenoch: the new leader of the Tory Conservative, and the first black woman to be elected to lead a major UK political party—a feat which, regardless of critique, requires some applause. Not only has she mastered the complex and elitist game of British politics, but has also mastered its language, optics, and its high demand for palatability.

She has made her immigrant identity, once markers of marginality, legible to power by sanding down its political possibilities and edges. Her immigrant roots now serve as credentials for gatekeeping, and for all her efforts, a senior member of her own party framed her ascension as: “… I believe in playing your losing cards first.”

This isn’t a critique born of bitterness, but of clarity. For those of us in the diaspora, we know far too well that success is rarely neutral.

The choices we make—with whom we align, whom we distance ourselves from, and the truths we suppress—upon arrival, shape more than just our careers. They shape what becomes possible, or impossible, for those coming after us. Badenoch declaring that “reparations are a scam”, signalled an internal tug-of-war between assimilation and disavowal. When Badenoch and her party proposes policies that double how long it takes for 'the next Kemi' to become a citizen, she is shaping what is possible for the rest of us. Thus, when I look at Badenoch, I not only acknowledge the comfort that comes with power and the lengths to which one could go to secure both, but also a method behind the madness.

I wonder why she feels so comfortable repairing and strengthening the glass ceilings she shattered—systemic and structural incentives for upholding the status quo notwithstanding. I wonder how she found purchase among a group of people who demonise her community, and how she finds the grace to perform a non-threatening kind of foreignness for their edification? Ultimately, I wonder what it means to be a global citizen as someone with roots in the Global South who now resides in nations shaped by complex historical transfers of resources and wealth. A person to whom much has been provided and restricted. And I worry that I am primed to follow Badenoch’s path.

I feel as if the broad strokes of our life are similar.

Like Badenoch, I relocated to the UK as a teenager for education, stayed with a family friend, and worked in hospitality to support myself—though I acknowledge this doesn't make me 'working class.' We both assimilated intensely into white British culture upon arrival. Later, when I entered politics peripherally, I too defended a status quo that perpetuates inequality, discrimination, and subjugation, simply because I personally benefited from it socially and financially. Put simply, because I was comfortable.

I know how isolating this mindset can be—how alone you feel when you refuse to acknowledge the connections that support you, even severing them. You become divorced from reality, consumed with maintaining a distorted worldview.

Because I'm intimately familiar with these feelings and their context, I struggle to understand how Badenoch lives her politics.

To be a global citizen or foreigner first requires seeing yourself as one—not as Badenoch appears to: a burdened British citizen in an increasingly demanding interconnected world.

Or oddly, as a British citizen of Yoruba origin, completely bypassing Nigeria itself—the geopolitical entity Britain created to make that 'Yorubaness' legible and thus subjugatable. This same geopolitical construction allows southern Nigerians like her to claim they have nothing in common with “those people” in northern Nigeria.

Being a global citizen entails specific responsibilities and obligations—what political philosophy calls a social contract, law terms a constitution, and economics refers to as the invisible hand (in Adam Smith's original conception, where sympathy, not self-interest, was the market's linchpin). It means recognizing what you owe to those around you—beyond, behind, next to, separate from, and enjoined to you.

This is where, I believe, the elitist game of British politics lead Badenoch astray. Her social mobility as a first-generation immigrant gives credence to the myth of individual progress and bootstrap-pulling, suggesting that enough personal responsibility guarantees success. But being a global citizen—especially far from home—means acknowledging you've never done it alone. Ms. Badenoch, it means opening your doors to others, just as someone opened their home to you at 16.

So yes, I have always been a foreigner, and I probably always will be. This is not something that was imposed upon me, but something I have chosen—a position and way of being that I embrace. I do this because it allows me to be more human—to acknowledge that as I make my new home and build a community, I am not alone.

Neither are you Ms Badenoch—even if you refuse to see it.