By Jonathan Ishaku
These are days of politics. Uncertainty rules the waves. E ven words appear to have lost their ordinary meanings. We live in an age where public speech is instantly seized, twisted, weaponised and thrown back into the arena of anger. George Orwell called it “doublespeak”: the corruption of language until truth and falsehood begin to wear each other’s clothes.
Admittedly, our politicians have often earned the public suspicion that greets almost everything they say. They have promised light and delivered darkness; promised relief and delivered fresh burdens; promised sacrifice and then displayed luxury. The people are, therefore, not wrong to be angry. The hardship in the land is real. The cost of food is punishing. The pressure on homes is unbearable. Nigerian women, especially market women, widows, petty traders, farmers’ wives, and mothers feeding children from almost nothing, are carrying a weight that no government official should ever trivialise.
But anger must still leave room for fairness. In this particular instance, I believe there has been a deliberate and wicked misrepresentation of the First Lady’s point.
Senator Oluremi Tinubu, speaking in defence of the Renewed Hope Initiative, reportedly encouraged low-capital petty businesses such as frying akara, roasting corn and making kuli-kuli, while stressing that the support being given was in the form of grants, not loans. Reports also indicated that the intervention included ₦50,000 grants to petty traders under women economic empowerment programmes. Whatever one may think of the government’s wider economic policies, there is nothing inherently insulting in recognising the economic power of small, honest trade.
I stand here in defence of that statement, not because I am blind to the suffering of Nigerians, and certainly not because I think akara, kuli-kuli or roasted corn can substitute for sound economic management, jobs, affordable food, stable currency and public accountability. No. I defend the statement because I know the dignity, power and history of such work.
I am a proud son of a kossai (akara)-frying mother and a pastor father. Let no one tell me that akara is a symbol of poverty or failure. In my own home, it was one of the instruments of survival, discipline, sacrifice and advancement. A substantial part of the little income from that humble trade went into the upkeep and education of my siblings and me. My mother did it with pride of labour. She did not see herself as diminished by honest work. She stood before the fire, oil and batter not as a defeated woman, but as a builder of lives.
That is why her children today can look back, not with shame, but with gratitude.
There is a generation of Nigerians whose school fees were paid from trays of akara, basins of kunu, bowls of masa, roasted corn stands, kuli-kuli baskets, moi-moi wraps, pepper-grinding machines, roadside tea stalls and market-table economies. Many graduates, journalists, teachers, doctors, pastors, civil servants, soldiers and business people were produced from these small rivers of income. The women behind them were not economists by title, but they understood production, pricing, savings, reinvestment, customer relations and family budgeting better than many people who now mock petty enterprise from air-conditioned arrogance.
The tragedy is that some critics speak as though every empowerment must begin with millions. Of course, if multi-million-naira opportunities come, we thank God. But most lives do not begin from the top. Many begin from a small tray, a small table, a small fire, a small loan, a small grant, a small daily profit carefully protected from waste. Yesterday, that was the model. In many homes tomorrow, it will still be the model.
The real issue, therefore, is not whether akara or kuli-kuli is a legitimate business. It is. The real issue is whether government is doing enough to make such businesses profitable, protected and scalable. That is where citizens must insist on accountability. A woman frying akara should not be ruined by the price of beans, kerosene, gas, vegetable oil, rent, transport, taxation, harassment and inflation. A woman selling roasted corn should not be chased from the roadside by task forces when town planners have created no humane market space for her. A woman making kuli-kuli should not be trapped permanently at survival level because there is no access to packaging, credit, cooperatives, processing equipment or wider markets.
This is where the debate should be: not in mocking petty trade, but in demanding that the state dignify it.
Ironically, the same mentality that ridicules the First Lady’s reference to akara and kuli-kuli is often the mentality behind the cruel urban policies that send governors and municipal officials into the streets to destroy the livelihoods of the poor. They call petty traders “eyesores.” They chase away akara fryers, maize sellers, shayi men, fruit sellers, suya vendors and roadside food women without creating planned, affordable alternatives for them. In the name of beautifying cities, they manufacture destitution. In the name of order, they deepen hunger.
Those who mock the First Lady’s statement without defending these women are, knowingly or unknowingly, in league with the out-of-touch elitism that treats the poor as a nuisance.
Yes, the people are disappointed with government. They have every right to be. But lump-sum condemnation is intellectually lazy and morally unfair. Even if a public figure may belong to a vilified incumbent government at times of election, he or she may still say or do something true and helpful. A First Lady may be associated with power and still act from compassion. To reject everything because it comes from the “opponent’s” political quarter is to throw away the baby with the bath water.
There is also a history to the informal moral role of First Ladies. In Nigeria, Maryam Babangida’s Better Life Programme for Rural Women, launched in 1987, made the economic condition of rural women a national conversation in a way that had not been done before. Beyond Nigeria, Eleanor Roosevelt used the symbolic power of the American First Lady’s office to stand against racial exclusion when Marian Anderson was denied the use of Constitution Hall in 1939; her resignation from the Daughters of the American Revolution helped push that injustice into national attention and contributed to the historic Lincoln Memorial concert. These examples remind us that, sometimes, conscientious women close to power have softened the harsh edges of power, challenged oppressive systems and opened doors that formal authority had shut.
From what I have personally seen of Senator Oluremi Tinubu’s interventions in Plateau State over the years, over the repeated killings and destructive activities of the armed non-state actors, I am persuaded that she has a heart for vulnerable people, especially women and children. That does not absolve the government of responsibility. It does not cancel the pain of the masses. It does not mean citizens should stop demanding better. But it means we must be careful not to turn every intention into a weapon merely because politics has poisoned our ears.
Our mothers deserve better than this careless contempt for their labour.
The woman who fries akara is not a joke. The woman who roasts corn is not a symbol of backwardness. The woman who makes kuli-kuli is not a failure of modern ambition. She is an entrepreneur, a family economist, a community feeder, a trainer of children, a stabiliser of homes and, in many cases, the silent pillar upon which the so-called successful stand.
Many of us are products of such women. We were raised by hands roughened by firewood, charcoal, frying oil, grinding stones, farm tools, market baskets and dawn-to-dusk labour. Their businesses did not make newspaper headlines, but they made human beings. They did not speak the language of venture capital, but they understood sacrifice capital. They did not attend business schools, but they ran survival schools from which many of us graduated into life.
So let us criticise government where government has failed. Let us demand jobs, lower food prices, better planning, security, infrastructure and a more humane economy. Let us insist that grants must be transparent, sufficient, non-partisan and truly targeted at the poor. But let us not mock the humble trades that have sustained Nigerian families for generations.
Politics may confuse language, but words must retain their meanings. Honest work is still honest work. Small business is still business. Poverty is not cured by contempt for the poor. And the labour of our mothers — whether in akara, kossai, kuli-kuli, roasted corn, masa, moi-moi, kunu or the thousand other modest enterprises of survival — remains one of the noblest chapters in the Nigerian story.