The Nigerian First Lady’s remarks encouraging women to take up businesses such as frying akara, roasting corn, and making kuli-kuli have sparked one of the country’s most revealing economic debates in recent years. For some, the remarks acknowledged the millions of Nigerians who earn an honest living through informal businesses. For others, they epitomized the disconnect between political leadership and the economic aspirations of a nation confronting inflation, unemployment, and declining living standards.
Both opinions and interpretations from different perspectives really don’t capture the whole story. The controversy, however, is not fundamentally about “akara, roasted corn, or kuli-kuli”; it is about the economics behind the advice and the almost hysterical criticism that followed.
More specifically, it is about what I describe as Akara Economics—an economic narrative that elevates subsistence entrepreneurship as the principal response to structural economic challenges. It is a philosophy that sees poverty alleviation through microenterprise rather than prosperity through productivity, industrialization, and institutional reform.
As a woman entrepreneur in the hair care and styling sector, no honest work is beneath anyone. Akara sellers, market women, roadside mechanics, and countless others keep Nigeria’s informal economy alive. Across Nigeria, millions survive through these informal enterprises that demonstrate extraordinary resilience and ingenuity. These businesses sustain families, create local supply chains, and contribute significantly to economic activity. They deserve the recognition from the First Lady.
The question, however, is whether a government should present subsistence enterprise as the answer to widespread economic hardship. There is an important distinction between recognising the value of informal enterprise and elevating it into a substitute for a national development strategy. This is where government starts to overreach by confusing economic survival with economic development.
The informal economy is, at its core, people solving problems through private initiative. It thrives on individual creativity, voluntary exchange, and the freedom to respond to market demand. Government’s role is to create an enabling environment for such enterprise, not to substitute it for a broader economic strategy.
Economists often distinguish between two kinds of entrepreneurship. One is driven by opportunity—people spotting market gaps and building businesses that create jobs. The other is driven by necessity—people starting businesses because there are few alternatives. Their enterprises often generate subsistence income rather than sustained economic growth. The danger here is that elevating necessity entrepreneurship as public policy risks normalising an economy in which more people become entrepreneurs because they have no viable alternatives.
This is evident in our day-to-day life. When you look at the proliferation of roadside vendors, food sellers, motorcycle mechanics, phone repairers, and countless microenterprises, it is frequently celebrated as evidence of entrepreneurial spirit. Yes, Nigerians are undeniably entrepreneurial. It is equally true, however, that many have been pushed into self-employment by an economy that has failed to generate enough productive jobs.
When citizens become entrepreneurs because formal employment is scarce rather than because opportunities abound, entrepreneurship becomes a symptom of economic distress rather than a sign of economic dynamism.
This is the broader implication of the First Lady’s remarks. Whether intentionally or not, they reflect an economic mindset that emphasizes adaptation over transformation. The message is not, “Here is how we are restructuring the economy to create productive employment.” Instead, it is, “Here is how citizens can survive within existing economic conditions.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with encouraging enterprise. Governments around the world promote small businesses through grants, training, and access to finance. The problem arises when survival enterprises become substitutes for structural reforms.
No country has achieved sustained prosperity by encouraging the majority of its citizens to remain in low-productivity informal activities. The economic histories of South Korea, Singapore, China, Vietnam, and even post-war Germany illustrate that broad-based prosperity emerged from investments in industrialization, education, infrastructure, technological innovation, and institutions that enabled businesses to grow beyond subsistence.
Small businesses flourished because the economy itself expanded.
Nigeria’s challenge is, therefore, not a shortage of entrepreneurs. It is a shortage of productive opportunities.
Nigeria arguably possesses one of Africa’s youngest and most energetic populations. Like many Nigerians, I want an economy where effort is rewarded with stable electricity, affordable credit, reliable infrastructure, and policies that allow small businesses to grow into medium-sized firms rather than remain permanent survival projects.
In such an economy, selling akara becomes one entrepreneurial option among many, not the defining symbol of economic aspiration.
Ironically, akara itself represents a sophisticated value chain. It links farmers cultivating beans, traders supplying inputs, transporters moving goods, processors, retailers, and consumers. There is genuine economic activity embedded within every piece of akara sold. But value chains become engines of development only when productivity rises, technology improves, businesses formalize, and markets expand.
Otherwise, they remain trapped within the cycle of survival.
This is why the public reaction to the First Lady’s remarks should not be dismissed as social media cynicism. The backlash reflected a growing frustration with an economic discourse that appears increasingly comfortable managing poverty instead of overcoming it.
Nigeria deserves a conversation that extends beyond survival.
It deserves policies that reduce the cost of doing business, strengthen property rights, expand access to quality education, attract investment, encourage innovation, and create conditions under which microenterprises can evolve into small firms, small firms into medium enterprises, and medium enterprises into globally competitive businesses.
The real test of an economy is not how many people can survive by selling akara. It is whether people have genuine choices. They should be free to sell akara because they see an opportunity—not because the economy has left them with few alternatives. That is the difference between an economy that manages poverty and one that creates prosperity.
In the end, the First Lady did more than spark a debate about akara. The debate her remarks exposed was a deeper question: should Nigeria aspire to build an economy that helps people survive, or one that gives them the opportunity to thrive?
That, ultimately, is the real meaning of Akara Economics.
Adediran, head, Project and Advocacy, Institute for Free Market and Entrepreneurship West Africa (IFREME) Ibadan, Nigeria
+234 808 322 0039
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