Meet the Four Nigerians who won Seats In The UK Parliament

Four British politicians of Nigerian pedigree have also won their respective parliamentary seats. Helen Grant won the seat for Member of Parliament representing Maidstone and The Weald while Chuka Umunna won the elections to represent Streatham. Kate Osamor won the seat for Edmonton in North London while Chi Onwurah won the seat for New Castle upon Tyne Central.

Chi Onwurah

50-year-old Chi Onwurah 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.

Chuka Umunna

36-year-old Chuka Harrison Umunna won the elections to represent Streatham.

Mr. Umunna is a British Labour Party politician who has served Streatham as Member of Parliament since 2010. Umunna is the current Shadow Business Secretary since 2011. His father Bennett 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

53-year-old Ms. Grant won the seat for Member of Parliament representing Maidstone and The Weald in Kent.


She polled 22,745 votes, representing 45.5 per cent of the votes cast. 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.

Kate Osamor

Kate Osamor won Edmonton seat for Labour with a comfortable win over the Conservatives. 

The Labour candidate, who is taking the reins from long-standing MP Andy Love, gained a huge 25,388 votes, beating closest rival Conservative Gonul Daniels, who gained 9,969 votes. Ms Osamor, who has worked for the National Health Service (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 centerpiece of her campaign.

Source: Monitor