Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK Conservative Party, says she no longer identifies as a Nigerian, a few months after she described her ancestral home as a country where the government “destroys lives.”

The Tory leader, on the Rosebud podcast on Friday, said, “I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s,” adding, “I’ve never quite felt that I belonged there.”

“I don’t identify with it (Nigeria) anymore, most of my life has been in the UK and I’ve just never felt the need to,” Mrs Badenoch said.

She added, “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really.”

The Conservative Party leader said that though she is interested in developments in Nigeria, she found a better home in the UK, where she now lives with her family and party members.

“I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there,” Mrs Badenoch said. “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.”

Mrs Badenoch, 45, who was born in Wimbledon, South West London, in 1980, said she returned to the UK after her stay in Nigeria because her parent felt there was no future there.

“I think the reason that I came back here was actually a very sad one, and it was that my parents thought, ‘there is no future for you in this country’.”

Mrs Badenoch has been critical of Nigeria, often lamenting widespread corruption in the country and pushing against Nigerian immigrants coming to get UK citizenship.

In January, she said her push for stringent immigration laws was because she does not want Britain to be like Nigeria, a poor country where a “terrible” government destroys lives.