By Temi Salako
A remark by Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, encouraging struggling Nigerians to consider small-scale businesses such as frying akara, roasting corn and producing kuli-kuli has sparked widespread public debate, raising fresh questions about the government’s vision for economic empowerment amid the country’s worsening cost-of-living crisis.
Speaking in June while closing the second-quarter meeting of wives of state governors, the First Lady highlighted the impact of the Renewed Hope Initiative’s ₦50,000 cash grants distributed to 2,000 beneficiaries to help recapitalise small businesses. She argued that starting an akara business requires relatively little capital and could provide a sustainable source of income for many Nigerians seeking to rebuild their livelihoods.
The comments, however, quickly gained traction across social media, where they triggered a viral “akara challenge” and generated a flood of satire, criticism and political commentary. As public reaction intensified, the First Lady embarked on additional engagements across several states to explain the objectives of the empowerment programme, while President Bola Tinubu’s light-hearted reference to her as “Iya Alakara” further fuelled online discussions.
Beyond the humour and political exchanges, the controversy has shifted attention to broader questions about Nigeria’s economic direction and the role of informal enterprises in addressing unemployment and poverty. Critics argue that encouraging citizens to embrace microbusinesses reflects limited ambition at a time when many Nigerians expect policies capable of expanding industrial production, supporting innovation and creating higher-value jobs.
Supporters of the initiative, however, maintain that small-scale enterprises remain an essential source of income for millions of households and that targeted grants can provide immediate relief for vulnerable entrepreneurs facing inflation, rising operating costs and limited access to credit.
The debate has also drawn comparisons with recent comments by a Lagos-based investor whose viral presentation described Nigeria’s informal economy as a trillion-dollar opportunity capable of driving large-scale investment and economic transformation if properly supported through infrastructure, financing and policy reforms.
As public reactions continue, the First Lady’s remarks have become more than a conversation about akara. They have evolved into a wider national discussion over whether government-backed entrepreneurship programmes should focus primarily on subsistence businesses or pursue strategies that enable Nigerians to build enterprises capable of competing on a much larger scale. The episode underscores growing public expectations for economic policies that move beyond survival towards sustained wealth creation, productivity and inclusive national development.
The backlash was never really about akara’s dignity, whatever the government’s defenders now claim. Street food has fed generations of Nigerian households and financed the school fees of people who now run banks. The real complaint was arithmetic. Nigeria’s own poverty numbers, drawn from World Bank data, show the share of Nigerians below the national poverty line rising from 56 percent in 2023 to 63 percent in 2025, even as the government points to ₦50,000 grants as evidence of empowerment. Analysts who costed what an akara kiosk, frying pans, cooking oil, beans and rented space actually require in 2026 found the grant fell short of what the First Lady’s own suggestion demanded. One columnist put the saturation problem more bluntly than any economist managed: “if everybody sells akara, in Nigerian parlance, who go chop am?” The presidential aide sent out to defend the First Lady argued the informal sector is not marginal at all, calling akara fryers and kuli-kuli processors “the literal shock absorbers of our micro-economy,” and he is right about the scale. He is only wrong about what follows from it. An economy that large does not need more people pushed into it with a one-time gift. It needs the plumbing that turns hustle into an asset.
Days after the akara storm peaked, a different Nigerian woman went viral describing the exact same market in the opposite language. Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, founder of Aruwa Capital Management, gave an unplanned street interview to content creator James Dumoulin outside a Lagos hotel and, almost as an aside, reframed what the country had just spent a week mocking. The women selling milk, bread, soft drinks and water by the roadside might lack a formal bank account, she said, but “it’s a $1 trillion opportunity and nobody is talking about it.” Asked where smart capital should go next, she did not hesitate: “if you find businesses that are enabling the informal economy, you’ll be a billionaire.” The clip crossed 27 million views within days. What made it land is worth noticing. Rhodes was not romanticising the informal trader any more than the First Lady was mocking her. She was pricing her.
Rhodes has spent seven years proving that thesis rather than just stating it. She launched Aruwa Capital in 2019 with her own money after institutional investors rejected her for the better part of a decade, and the firm now manages close to $80 million backing businesses built around the exact traders Nigeria’s political class keeps handing frying pans. One portfolio company, OmniRetail, connects FMCG manufacturers and distributors directly to the informal shopkeepers who still account for more than 90 percent of Nigeria’s retail sales, layering in digital payments and short-term credit so a market stall can restock on buy-now-pay-later terms instead of scrounging capital weekly. Another, Fastizers, began in 2010 with 960 naira, about sixty cents at today’s rate, and is now a multimillion-dollar snack manufacturer built by selling into the same corner shops and roadside stands that Renewed Hope’s beneficiaries are being funded to join. Rhodes did not invent the informal economy’s value. She built financial infrastructure around it. That is the difference between a grant and a system.
Nigeria did not need Rhodes to discover this. A Norwegian-incorporated, Chinese-founded company already had. OPay entered Lagos in 2018 selling nothing more exotic than a point-of-sale machine to roadside agents, betting that a market too informal for the banks was not too informal for capital. It built a network of more than half a million agents inside market stalls, bus stops and the same kiosks government now proposes as the height of ambition, and turned that network into a fintech valued north of two billion dollars, with homegrown rivals like Moniepoint following the same playbook into unicorn status. If a Chinese billionaire routing his fintech through Oslo can look at Nigeria’s roadside economy and see a business empire, and a Lagos-born fund manager can look at the same market and see a trillion-dollar asset class, the failure of imagination inside Renewed Hope is not a communications problem. It is a strategy problem.
Other countries facing the same informality did not solve it with better slogans either; they solved it with plumbing only a state can lay. In Kenya, regulators let a telecom company build M-Pesa on top of the same market women and motorcycle riders Nigeria keeps calling vulnerable, and mobile money now moves transactions equivalent to more than half the country’s GDP, with World Bank researchers crediting the platform for a measurable decline in poverty. India ran its own version through the Jan Dhan banking drive, linking a national identity number and a mobile line to bank accounts for hundreds of millions of previously unbanked citizens, turning street vendors and rickshaw pullers into people with a credit history, not just recipients of a one-time gift. Neither government asked its traders to sell something different. Both built the rails that let traders sell the same things at a different scale. Kenya’s own labour audit of its informal sector, before those reforms closed the gap, found barely one in ten enterprises operating under any real contract with a supplier or buyer, precisely the gap a national ID, a credit bureau and simple business registration exist to close.
No one can out-hustle a Nigerian trader; that much of the government’s defence is honest. But a trader cannot build her own national identity database, cannot write her own credit bureau into law, cannot negotiate her own tax simplification, and cannot lay the market infrastructure that turns a hundred akara sellers into a hundred businesses with a paper trail. Those are the only items on this list government cannot outsource to hustle, and they are exactly what Renewed Hope has not touched. Rhodes and OPay did not need government’s permission to see a trillion dollars sitting in Nigeria’s markets. What they, and every trader Nigeria claims to be empowering, still need from government is the system that lets that trillion dollars show up in a bank statement instead of a frying pan.