By Our Correspondent
British Conservative Party leader and UK Minister, Kemi Badenoch, has shared a deeply personal and critical account of her time as a student at Federal Government Girls College (FGGC), Sagamu, describing the experience as akin to being in prison.
In a video clip from a recent interview circulating on social media, Badenoch reflected on her teenage years at the Nigerian boarding school, revealing that the conditions were grueling and emotionally taxing.
“I went to a secondary school, it was called a federal government girls school in a place called Sagamu.
“And that was like being in prison when I tell the stories about using a machete and having to fetch buckets of water,” she said.
Recounting life as a boarder, she said it was her first time away from home and that the school facilities were difficult to manage, especially for young girls.
She explained that students were responsible for maintaining the school environment themselves, even performing tasks usually done by hired staff in other school systems.
“And that was the first time that I was away from home, away from my family. It’s a federal boarding school. And it was a dormitory with about 150 [girls] I think, 20 to 30 in a room. And there were, you know, six rooms.
“The machete was for cutting the grass. Well, because, who else is going to cut the grass?
“We needed to look after the school grounds. So using a machete, having to clean toilets with no running water. I’m not going to go into the description of that,” she stated.
Badenoch also criticised the policy of federal allocation of students to distant schools, calling it a leftover from socialist-era educational practices.
According to her, “This is a federal school where, this old grammar school system sort of fading out, and everyone who passed an exam and got a certain school, got to go to a federal school.
“And this was more socialism. So they sprinkled people around. They didn’t want one school getting all the best results. They would mix people about so you could end up getting sent thousands of miles away to a boarding school, you know, at the extreme end of the country.
“So I was lucky. I didn’t get sent too far away, but I was very far from home. I’d never been away from home before, and it was like Lord of the Flies, you know, the students were in control.”
