By Promise Adiele, PhD
The recent nationwide outrage against Nigeria’s First Lady, Mrs Oluremi Tinubu, affirms that Nigerians are ungrateful people. Instead of them to grovel, prostrate, and kneel, despite their agonizing economic conditions, and thank the First Lady for her first-class microeconomic advice, they are busy hurling insults at her. What kind of impudence is that anyway? The Delta State-born former Senator recently advised Nigerians to embrace frying akara, roasting corn, and selling kuli-kuli as their ultimate road to profound economic prosperity. What is wrong with the advice? Kilode!!! In simple terms, the First Lady asked Nigerians to set aside all their aspirations to digital tech hubs, forget all about ICT-inspired start-ups, tear up their university degrees, and embrace roadside entrepreneurial collective salvation. Nigerians must be grateful that such a wonderful National Poverty Initiative (NPI) is coming from the First Lady at a time when the populace is frolicking in surplus and overflowing economic conditions.
We must adhere to this advice because Aso Rock tenants are beneficiaries of this magnificent business idea – they feed on akara, corn, and kuli-kuli every morning. In fact, President Tinubu and his aides carry corn in their pockets anywhere they go. It is their favourite snack. All the Senators and Honourable members of the House of Representatives are desperately searching for akara, corn and kuli-kuli. All political office holders in the country are not left out. They feed on these delicacies every day. We must appreciate the First Lady for finally diagnozing our excruciating fiscal malaise and prescribing the solution to the country’s unemployment disaster. She has provided the missing link in the suffering machinery of Nigerians by revealing the billions that abound in the flipping of greasy akara, rotating roasted corn, and vending brittle kuli-kuli by the roadside. At last, Nigerians can walk straight to economic prosperity.
The First Lady didn’t claim to have attended Harvard Business School. Still, her latest advice to Nigerians would make any Harvard Business School graduate turn green with envy. Although many people consider her latest entrepreneurial advice condescending, insensitive, wicked, and deeply insulting, I think she should lead Nigeria’s economic policy formulation team. Dr Okonjo Ngozi Iweala should also pay attention and learn from our First Lady. I heard that the World Trade Centre and the World Bank are sending delegates to learn this new economic policy advice from the First Lady. How lucky can Nigeria be? Finally, the country is negotiating the last bend away from poverty.
While underdeveloped countries like Singapore, India, Malaysia, Canada, and the United States are wasting their national budgets funding silicon fabrication plants, semiconductor research, advanced aerospace networks, and upgrading their electricity supply, Nigeria’s Renewed Hope Agenda has summersaulted backwards into the Stone Age. Many people have argued that frying akara, roasting corn, and selling kuli-kuli were profitable business enterprise in Nigeria in those days when the naira had value and our environment was secure, but now, the naira still has value and our environment is very secure. So, there is no difference between now and then and that is why I think we should celebrate our First Lady. Who needs an industrial master plan, a stable electrical grid, or a functioning currency when you have a rusty, blackened iron tripod, a steady supply of toxic charcoal smoke, and a basin of peeled beans? Did Aliko Dangote, Mike Adenuga, Tony Elumelu, Femi Otedola, Allen Onyema, Cosmas Maduka and other billionaires in Nigeria not rise to the top by frying akara, roasting corn, and mixing kuli-kuli? Indeed, Nigerians are ungrateful people. Haba!!!
The wonderful thing about the First Lady’s Hades-inspired akara, corn, and kuli-kuli start-up advice is that it is spectacularly cheap and simple. Since it is cheap to start, Nigeria does not need to worry about lowering staggering inflation, rescuing the drowning naira, tackling searing unemployment, or attracting foreign direct investment. The real solution is for starving Nigerians to pull themselves up, find a corner by the street where no rent is required, and make billions monthly. Under this glorious fiscal framework, we must immediately overhaul our national educational priorities. For too long, Nigerian youths have been distracted by dangerous, unproductive illusions like software engineering, biomedical research, acting, creativity, financial literacy, and other modern entrepreneurial endeavours. The First Lady’s timely, bizarrely intervention reminds us that true national growth looks like a smoke-filled, potholed street corner.
We must immediately restructure our academic institutions to begin to award Bachelor’s degrees in Akara Flipping (BAF), replacing obsolete degrees in Catering and Hotel Management. We must also award a PhD in Corn Roasting Analytics to complement a Master’s degree in Food Technology. We must replace International Trade with a degree in Advanced Kuli-Kuli Logistics. All university Vice-Chancellors in Nigeria should take note of these excellent educational ideas. Imagine the sheer efficiency of a country where every citizen is an independent roadside food vendor. Graduates of biochemistry will no longer look for nonexistent laboratory jobs. Instead, they will apply their knowledge of chemical heat transfer to master the exact frying point of akara soaked in cheap vegetable oil, roasted corn and heated kuli-kuli. A certified chartered accountant will find supreme fulfilment in calculating the precise profit margin of a single corncob, a cup of beans for akara, and a bucket of groundnut for kuli-kuli over a gruelling, twelve-hour shift in the exploitative, capitalist financial market.
Nigerians must appreciate this government for its wonderful economic masterplan which has finally been revealed. We can also export these products because I hear world powers are increasingly demanding Akara, Corn, and Kuli-kuli (ACK). It will grow our GDP astronomically and revive the comatose Nigerian economy. As Nigerians wallow in the dirty corners of the street, frying akara, inhaling the poisonous smoke, roasting corn, and selling kuli-kuli, our amiable First Lady, family and cronies are ensconced in posh air-conditioned houses, dressed in gold and expensive clothes with the full complement of servants. That is what makes her economic and survival blueprint a flawless entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this new National Poverty Initiative business, you do not require stable electricity or clean pipe-borne water because you can fetch water from a borehole in plastic buckets. You do not need to worry about the soaring, prohibitive price of cooking gas, because the charcoal seller down the road is always available—assuming you can afford the newly inflated price of wood.
The brilliance of this model is its self-sustaining circularity. If Citizen A fries akara, Citizen B roasts corn, and Citizen C rolls kuli-kuli, they can simply spend the entire day trading these three delicacies among one another. The economy becomes completely insulated from global market shocks. The crashing value of the naira matters little when our primary currency is the transactional value of crunchy akara, corn, and kuli-kuli. The World Bank and other mega global financial institutions can keep their derivative markets. Nigeria will soon emerge as a leading economic superpower through flourishing roadside carbohydrates and protein enterprise. Of course, some ungrateful, cynical internet commentators have claimed that this advice feels somewhat insulting. They point out the glaring, nauseating irony of a leadership class that travels in multi-billion-naira presidential jet fleets and drives armored SUVs, telling the masses to find economic joy in a charcoal grill.
The galling contrast is beautifully personified in the dazzling, jet-setting lifestyle of the First Son himself, Seyi Tinubu. While the First Lady commands the sons and daughters of ordinary Nigerians to sit on dirt floors turning akara in boiling oil to survive, her darling son bravely navigates the crushing economic hardships in Nigeria from the plush leather seats of private jets, expensive BMW and Mercedes cars. While the average youth is told that ₦200,000 is an immense fortune to start a street-vending empire, the First Son’s wrist is frequently adorned with expensive timepieces worth thousands of dollars— watches that cost more than the entire capital required to set up an akara stand on every single street corner in West Africa. The First Lady visualizes a nation of smoky, low-income labourers, while her son sits atop a glittering, multi-billion-naira empire of premium billboard advertising, tech investments, and corporate monopolies. It is a flawless division of labour – the masses provide the smoke, and the first family provides the mirrors.
We must abandon the antiquated, hectic aspirations of structural industrialization, digital innovation, and infrastructural development. They require a functional government, transparent resource management, and visionary policies. These things are far too complex and cumbersome to orchestrate. Why bother building working refineries, fixing the national grid, or creating high-paying corporate jobs for the youths when the path to survival is as simple as lighting a match underneath a pan of oil? We must lift our voices in gratitude for this matchless policy direction. The next time you see the thick, black smoke rising from a roadside frying pan, do not see a tragic symbol of systemic poverty, mass unemployment, or the crushing failure of economic governance. See it for what it truly is – the glorious, charcoal-scented, grotesquely unequal realization of the Renewed Hope Agenda.
Promise Adiele PhD is of Mountain Top University and can be reached at promee01@yahoo.com, X: @drpee4