Who surprised the world the most in 2024?

Two thousand and twenty-four (2024) was like sickness and the cure mixed together. One of those years which did not lend itself to a clear appreciation of exactly what was upon us.
It was not altogether a bad year, until December, when the aviation industry gave us the worst scare, recording seven plane crashes in that month alone, including the deadly Korea disaster that claimed 179 lives.
The rest of 2024 had manageable surprises, especially as the Ukraine-Russia war was still in force. Syria’s Assad was deposed. Ghana reelected a former president.

Icons and iconoclasts
In the year, two personalities surprised the world. My nine year old keeps asking when Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would debate again.
It looked like the American presidential campaigns were never going to end. Trump and Kamala were in our sights and in our dreams.
Donald Trump’s 34 felony charges and two impeachments didn’t mean much for the American electorate. This time, the former president did not only aim at draining the swamp; he meant to kill it anon.

President-Elect Trump has joked that he would make Canada America’s 51st state. Already, the Canadians are fretting over his threat to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian products.
That tariff scare has seen the resignation of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister/Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland. Canada is also bracing up for what Trump’s mass deportation plan will mean for the immigration and refugee containment at the borders when he takes office on January 20 2025.
At this point, the world must be used to a controversial iconoclast who tears into established conventions and tramps all that is usual each time he speaks.
Another iconoclast (bold-thinking nonconformist) who surprised the world the most in 2024, was Kemi Badenock, the leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. The Nigerian immigrant is this column’s person of the year 2024.
On November 02 2024 when she beat former immigration minister Robert Jenrick to lead the Tories, I wanted to be a cultural Christian, as Kemi describes herself, and get a few beers to toast the election of the first black leader of a major political party in the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s party.
Kemi’s victory sent me back sixteen years when Barack Obama made history as the first black president in the White House–bearing a Muslim middle name (Hussein) in post 9/11 America.
Cultural Christian
Have you met Kemi Badenoch? You hear things like ‘she was rude in the tea room’. What does Kemi mean when she says she is a cultural Christian?
It refers to a person who doesn’t have a personal faith but whose worldview is broadly Christian. Her husband is Catholic, so while agnostic, she describes herself as ‘honorary Catholic’.
It is quite confusing (a byproduct of her nonconformist nature and rugged individualism). Kemi would not come as close as a local councilor in her native Nigeria if she called herself a cultural Christian. In the UK, it didn’t hold her back.
Unlike women politicians in Nigeria and Ghana who dread the proverbial glass ceiling and worry about personal attacks enabled by missiles from a man’s world, Kemi is unafraid to blow against the wind.
A popular news magazine compared her with Jesus Christ: “profoundly countercultural”. Here is a young, small-looking black lady in free-thinking and cosmopolitan London, who was hated by significant Britons, including actor David Tennant, who publicly proclaimed that he “hoped for a day that Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore and would shut up”.
A respected voice in British journalism, Andrew Marr, warned that the Tories will regret it if they elected Kemi as leader. She shook the tables against six contenders and won.

Immigration script
Is Kemi your regular immigrant? She was born in Wimbledon, UK, in 1980 to a professor mum and a medical doctor dad, both Nigerians. She was sent to Nigeria where she lived until age 16 when she returned to the UK.
This pattern is typical of African immigrants. In London, she started work at Mcdonalds. This is also typical of the African working class in the UK. While she is proudly Nigerian, Kemi’s accent does not give her away.
Meanwhile, she does not speak with the quintessential British accent. Her diction is clear and succinct, masterfully delivered with a hint of refined academic Britishness, like Professor Henry Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’.
After her Engineering degree, Kemi acquired an LLB from Birbeck, University of London. This two-three degree route is common with African immigrants.
My roommate took four degrees. But this is where Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke (her full name), seemed to have departed from the African immigrant script.
Perhaps buoyed by her Nigerian defying venturesomeness, she sprinted into politics, where she met husband Hamish Badenock, marrying in 2012.
She won a seat in the House of Commons in 2017 and 2022. Moving from one ministerial portfolio to another, she mothers three kids and goes ahead to lead the Conservative party.
Kemi did not only surprise conservative Britain; she appended her Nigerian Britishness on the pages of history. Her name Olukemi means ‘God cares for me’. And He sure did.
I had my personal surprises in 2024. Just as I began penning this edition, sad news came through from home: OD, my friend, had died.
She spent only two hours in 2025. That makes it a double whammy of agony, as I have never recovered from the painful death of my brilliant little sister, Squadron Leader Esther Ofori, (nee Oduro-Konadu) of the Ghana Air Force, in March 2024 in Texas. In her short but glorious life, Esther cured many hearts, but her sickness missed the cure.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
Tissues Of The Issues
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