Kemi Badenoch has said she does not see herself as Nigerian and no longer has a passport for the country.
The Conservative Party leader was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria.
When the country’s economy collapsed in the 1990s, her parents took advantage of her British passport to get her out, sending her at the age of 16 to live with a family friend in south London to continue her education.
She said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades in an interview with the Rosebud podcast.
“I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s.
“I don’t identify with it any more, most of my life has been in the UK and I’ve just never felt the need to.”
She said she had to get a visa to visit the country when her father died, which she described as a “big fandango”.
“I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents… but by identity I’m not really.
“I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there.
“But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family – my extended family, I call it,” she said.
The North West Essex MP said her early experiences in Nigeria shaped her political outlook, including “why I don’t like socialism”.
“And I remember never quite feeling that I belonged there,” she added.
The Tory leader said the reason she returned to the UK as a teenager was a “a very sad one”.
“It was that my parents thought: ‘There is no future for you in this country’.”
She has not experienced racial prejudice in Britain “in any meaningful form”, she said.
“I knew I was going to a place where I would look different to everybody, and I didn’t think that that was odd,” she said.
“What I found actually quite interesting was that people didn’t treat me differently, and it’s why I’m so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.”
