Indians may be claiming him but the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak has deep connections to Africa that very few have been talking about since he was confirmed as the next politician in charge of Number 10 Downing Street.
At 42 the Oxford educated politician is the youngest PM in Britain after Robert Jenkinson who occupied the position between 1812 and 1827.
He was confirmed as the UK’s fourth prime minister since 2016 after his past immediate predecessor Truss lasted just 45 days thanks to a succession of disastrous economic policies which saw her position as premier increasingly untenable.
With over 150 MPs supporting his bid for the premiership, Sunak beat female rival Penny Mordaunt who could not garner the threshold of 100 backers from within the Conservative Party to stop him being second time lucky for the post.
Since then much is being said about the married father of two,
Sunak’s parents are of Indian extraction and moved to Britain from Kenya in the 1960s.
With a father born in Kenya and a mother born in neighbouring Tanzania, Sunak’s connection to Africa has shown how far UK politics has come from the days of yore when the only place for blacks and coloured was on the margins of British society of the post-war years.
Sunak’s parents emigrated to Britain in the middle of a wild exodus of immigrants from India and other Commonwealth countries which began in the late 1940s.
He was born in Southampton on 12 May 1980, a momentous year in Britain where Conservative prime minister Margret Thatcher held sway in the country’s strike-riven politics and the costly war against a junta-led Argentina for the disputed Falkland Islands two years later.
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson from 2020 to 2022 has inherited Liss Truss’s challenges to steer Britain’s troubled economy back to calmer climes and bridge the divide rocking the ruling Conservative Party which is trailing the Labour Party at the opinion polls.
All the more reason why Sunak has not expressed any keeness to respond affirmatively to Labour’s call to hold a general election and test the popularity of the Conservatives in power.
Meanwhile it is a curious twist of fate that Sunak who had forewarned catastrophy from a Truss-inspired proposed tax cut agenda when they went head to head for the premiership in September is now destined to fix them with time not on his side.
Speaking for the first time since it was clear that he would be prime minister, the former businessman said it would take time to address the pitfalls in the economy and get the pound stable again after hitting a torrid patch in the last couple of months.
A series of ill-advised economic policies encapsulated in an ill-fated mini-budget proposing tax cuts, the abolition of 45 percent top income tax rate, cuts to base income tax and removing duties on stamps, among others, left the financial markets tumbling with the pound sterling plummetting to unprecedeted lows earlier in October.
This precipitated the fall of Truss after just 45 days in office and set the stage for behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing over who would replace her.
The Southampton-born politician lost the vote to Truss last month but soon realised a reversal of fortune weeks later when it was clear that Britain’s shortest-lived premiership (6th September to 25th October 2022) was making its last breath.
The rest of the world have since been fixated by the deep divisions within the Conversative Party who in the space of six years had to change prime ministers from David Cameron to Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liss Truss and Rishi Sunak.
It is Sunak’s urgent task to not only bridge the divide within the Conservative Party but to also weather the economic storm caused by the disastrous moves by his predecessor and restore Britain’s place as a respected nation in Europe and the rest of the world.
Predictably India has gone haywire over news of Sunak’s imminent premiership, coming a long way from relative political obscurity to being Britain’s most powerful politician.
Being the first British Asian prime minister some Indian television channels have been gloating over one of their sons ”rising over the empire” and delightfully witnessing ”history coming full circle in Britain”.
Months ago Sunak’s views about an open society was put into perspective when he expressed his yearnings for Britian’s reputation as the safest and greatest country in the world to be gay.
Although opinion polls two years ago had hoisted him as the highest scoring British Chancellor since Denis Healey, his popularity since then had waned slightly thanks to what is perceived as his inadequate response to the torrid economic times in Britain.
WN/as/APA