Akara, Kulikuli, and the willful misunderstanding of Senator Remi Tinubu’s message

By Omooba Damilare Oloyede

The internet did what the internet does best this week. It took a 94-second press briefing, clipped it, memed it, and turned a serious point about grassroots enterprise into a national punchline of jokes and hard humour.

I watched the full briefing by Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, in her yellow lace buba and gele outside that glass-fronted building in Abuja. What she actually said was simple, and unfashionably true: starting small enterprises like selling akara, roasted corn, or kulikuli does not take a lot of money, and under the Renewed Hope Agenda, in supporting the administration of her husband, her office as First Lady is pushing grants, not loans, to help women start.

She also listed where her office has put money: two billion naira to tuberculosis care initiatives, one billion to breast cancer, half a billion to malnutrition, alongside scholarships, ICT training and agriculture support, amongst others.

That is what was said. What trended was: “First Lady says fry akara to survive.”

It is a willful misunderstanding, and it is costing us. Dignity is not in the size of the stall

At least, I understand little about how living and livelihood is Lagos and London, to tell you onw plain truth; small enterprises of less than £100 litter the streets of Lewisham, Dalston and Peckham, just as they do in Yaba, Kaduna and Benin.

In South London you will find Ghanaian aunties selling kelewele from a folding table, Jamaican patties from a hatch, suya-style corn roasting on Rye Lane on a Saturday night. Nobody calls it national embarrassment. They call it hustle. They call it a start.

Why then, when Senator Remi Tinubu tells Nigerian women that a roadside akara spot or a tray of kulikuli can be a beginning, do we scoff? A petty trade with ₦50,000 capital is not a life sentence. It is working capital. It is how millions of our mothers fed us, paid school fees, and built the first shop that became the second shop.

To sneer at akara is to sneer at the women who raised this country.

The First Lady was not saying akara will fix inflation. She was saying: do not wait to be rescued. Start where you are, and here is a grant, not a loan, to help you start.

That distinction matters. Grants do not choke you with interest when beans goes up in Bodija market.

We seem to have confused scale with seriousness

The backlash online has been ferocious, I know. Instagram reels from Lindaikejiblog, GossipMillNaija, Vanguard News and BBC News Pidgin turned the speech into a meme within hours, with comments mocking the idea that “akara business no cost plenty money”. But look past the emojis. One young man in Ibadan actually took the advice literally this week, fired up a corn drum, posted “Ibe eni agbado”, and asked people to pray for his venture. That is the spirit the First Lady was speaking to.

We keep waiting for a silver-bullet industrial policy to drop from the sky, while dismissing the real economy that already feeds our streets. Every big FMCG company in Nigeria today started with someone frying something in a backyard.

Akara is not the end goal. It is the entry point. It is proof of cash flow. It is a bank statement. It is how you learn pricing, customers, waste, and grit, before you scale to catering, to processing, to export.

Tell a woman in Osogbo with ₦50,000 that her kulikuli tray is shameful, and you have stolen her first rung.

What she actually got right

Three things in Senator Tinubu’s message deserve defending, not deriding:

Start small is sound economics. In Peckham, the plantain chips seller today is the Afro-Caribbean grocery owner tomorrow. Capital light, turnover fast. That is exactly akara and roasted corn.

Grants over loans. For the poorest traders, a loan is a trap. A grant is oxygen. That was her explicit point, repeated three times in the briefing.

Hope is policy too. “We didn’t give them a loan, we gave them a grant,” she said, urging Nigerians not to give up. In a season of high prices, telling women their hands still have value is not tone-deaf. It is leadership.

Is ₦50,000 enough to build a mansion in Banana Island? No. Is it enough to start frying akara tomorrow morning in Agege, turn a profit by noon, and feed your children that night? Yes. That is the point.

Let us stop mocking our own market women

If a British-Nigerian can sell puff-puff for £2 each at a Dalston market stall and get written up in Time Out, why is Mama Nkechi frying akara in Enugu a national joke?

The Renewed Hope Agenda will be judged on roads, power, naira stability, all of it. Fair. But it will also be judged on whether ordinary women got a fair start. Grants for akara, corn and kulikuli are exactly that kind of start.

Senator Remi Tinubu did not insult Nigerians. She reminded us who we are: a people who have always traded our way in resilience, grit and determination, out of tight corners.

Let the comedians have their skits. The rest of us should get back to work. Buy the beans. Heat the oil. Roast the corn.

A nation is built one small fire at a time.