FOUR BRITISH NIGERIANS WIN BRITISH PARLIAMENT SEATS
FOUR
BRITISH NIGERIANS WIN BRITISH PARLIAMENT SEATS
*As
20-Year-Old Emerges UK’s Youngest Lawmaker Since 1667
The just
concluded general election in Britain has been good to some Nigerian
participants, four of who won seats in the British parliament to represent
their constituencies. They are;
Chuka
Umunna
Chuka Umunna
Chuka
Harrison Umunna is a British Labour Party politician who has served Streatham
as Member of Parliament(MP) since 2010. Umunna is the current Shadow Business
Secretary since 2011. Chuka Umunna’s father Bennett, of the Nigerian Igbo
ethnic group, died in a road accident in Nigeria in 1992.
His
mother, Patricia, is a solicitor and daughter of Sir Helenus Milmo QC, the
Anglo-Irish High Court judge. Umunna was educated at Hitherfield Primary School
in Streatham, South London, and the Christ Church Primary School in Brixton
Hill. He says his parents felt that the local state school had “given up on
him” and so moved him to the boys’ independent senior school St Dunstan’s
College, in Catford in southeast London, where he played the cello, and became
Deputy Head Boy. During this period he was also a chorister at Southwark
Cathedral.
He was
awarded an upper second class LLB in English and French Law from the University
of Manchester; after graduating he studied for one term at the University of
Burgundy in Dijon, before studying for an MA at Nottingham Law School. He has
said that his politics and moral values come from Christianity, but that he is
“not majorly religious”
Helen
Grant
Helen Grant
Born 28
September 1961, Helen Grant is a British Conservative Party politician and
solicitor. She is the current Member of Parliament for Maidstone and The Weald
in Kent and the current Minister for Sport, Tourism & Equalities. She was
elected at the 2010 general election, replacing the constituency’s previous
incumbent, Ann Widdecombe, who had decided to step down as an MP. Grant was the
first black woman to be selected to defend a Tory seat and her election made
her the Conservatives’ first female black MP.
Grant
received her first government appointment in September 2012, when she received
the dual roles of Under-Secretary of State for Justice and Under-Secretary for
Women and Equalities. Grant was born in Willesden, north London to an English
mother and Nigerian father, but grew up in a single parent family after her
parents separated and her father emigrated to the United States. She was raised
in Carlisle where she lived on the city’s Raffles council estate with her
mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.
Chi
Onwurah
UK Labour Party’s Nigeria born Chi Onwurah
Chi
Onwurah (born 12 April 1965) is a British Labour Party politician, who was
elected at the 2010 general election as the Member of Parliament for Newcastle
upon Tyne Central, replacing the previous Labour MP Jim Cousins, who decided to
step down and left the seat. She is Newcastle’s first black MP. During the
depression of the 1930s, Onwurah’s maternal grandfather was a sheet metal
worker in Tyneside shipyards. Her mother grew up in poverty in Garth Heads on
Newcastle’s quayside. Her father, from Nigeria, was working as a dentist while
he studied at Newcastle Medical School when they met and married in the 1950s.
After Chi
was born in Wallsend, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1965, her family moved to Awka,
Nigeria when she was still a baby. Just two years later the Biafran Civil War
broke out bringing famine with it, forcing her mother to bring the children
back to Newcastle, whilst her father stayed on in the Biafran army.
Kate
Osamor
Kate Osamor
National
Health Service (NHS) manager Kate Osamor is the Labour Party’s parliamentary
candidate for the Edmonton constituency in London after stiff contest with
fellow diasporan Kate Anolue. Ms Osamor, who has worked for the NHS for 15
years, is a trade union activist, a women’s charity trustee and a member of the
Labour Party’s National Executive Committee. She made funding the NHS, opposing
its fragmentation and standing up to government cuts the centrepiece of her
campaign.
In a
related development, a 20-year-old Scottish student has become Britain’s
youngest lawmaker since 1667 — ousting one of Labour’s top figures in the
process. Politics student Mhairi Black represents the pro-independence Scottish
National Party (SNP), and took Paisley and Renfrewshire South, a constituency
outside Glasgow, from Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election chief and a former
Cabinet minister.