By Abubakar M Kareto
The public reactions following First Lady Oluremi Tinubu’s recent remarks advising Nigerians to embrace low-capital, small-scale businesses like selling akara, roasted corn, and kuli-kuli illustrate a deep, systemic frustration across the country. While the First Lady framed these micro-ventures as accessible entry points for the Renewed Hope Initiative’s grassroots grants, the immediate backlash online underlines a critical disconnect between the palliative approach of leadership and the modern economic aspirations of the populace. At a time when citizens are grappling with the harsh realities of subsidy removal, inflation, and skyrocketing costs of living, suggesting subsistence trading as a survival mechanism feels deeply uninspiring to a generation looking for structural economic transformation.
From an empirical standpoint, the advice to resort to micro-survival trades ignores the severe inflationary pressures destroying the informal sector. Recent economic data shows food inflation in Nigeria hovering above 40 percent, directly driving up the cost of raw inputs like beans, groundnuts, vegetable oil, and cooking gas. A roadside trader trying to fry akara or process kuli-kuli is immediately confronted with diminished consumer purchasing power and erratic supply costs that wipe out any projected profit margins. Expecting citizens to achieve financial stability through petty trade in an economy with highly volatile operational costs is economically unrealistic.
Furthermore, official statistics from small business regulatory bodies expose the high mortality rate of these micro-enterprises. Reports from organizations like the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) reveal that more than 95 percent of micro and small businesses fail within their first five years, with up to 50 percent collapsing in the first twelve months alone. These businesses do not fail due to a lack of willingness to work, but because of systemic bottlenecks such as infrastructure deficits, over 600 hours of power outages annually, and prohibitive transport costs. Promoting these high-risk survival trades as national economic solutions ignores the structural traps that prevent small businesses from surviving.
The strategy of distributing tiny grants to fund subsistence ventures represents a structural mismatch in public financial management. Research on recent micro-policy implementations shows that short-term financial interventions function primarily as consumption-smoothing mechanisms rather than tools for wealth creation. When a government provides small stipends for petty trades, the money is rapidly swallowed by immediate household survival needs like food, medical care, and rent, instead of being reinvested into fixed capital or expanding productive capacity. For national leadership to focus on these micro-stipends reveals an administrative framework that prioritizes short-term survival over long-term capital accumulation.
To put this into perspective, we can look at our healthcare architecture. We look to our premier Federal Medical Centres and tertiary Teaching Hospitals to pioneer complex medical research, advanced surgeries, and specialized clinical solutions. It would be an institutional failure if these apex centers exhausted their vast mandates and multi-billion naira allocations on treating routine malaria or seasonal cholera, which are tasks meant for primary healthcare clinics. In the exact same way, we must expect our highest offices of state to drive macro-economic infrastructure and high-impact policy design. Specialized federal institutions exist to solve structural crises that are beyond the capacity of local communities. When national governance structures reduce their focus to the level of basic survival trades, it compromises the strategic vision required to lift the nation out of economic hardship.
This structural disconnect is further complicated by questions of legal authority and fiscal origin, as the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides absolutely no legal backing or direct budgetary appropriations for the Office of the First Lady to distribute billions of naira under the guise of personal or state philanthropy. In established constitutional democracies like the United States or the United Kingdom, the spouses of presidents or prime ministers do not travel across regions distributing millions of dollars or pounds from unverified or public reserves, because institutional accountability strictly limits the spending of public wealth to elected representatives and statutory institutions. When an unelected office assumes the role of a parallel treasury to dispense vast sums for micro-survival interventions, it undermines the formal appropriation powers of the National Assembly and creates a governance model that prioritizes personal patronage over transparent, institutional financial management.
If civic advocacy and national leadership are to retain their authority in Nigeria, they must upgrade their focus. True, impactful empowerment means moving beyond the distribution of minor grants for subsistence living and focusing instead on building an environment where micro-enterprises can naturally scale into mechanized, sustainable businesses. To lift the populace out of economic hardship, the national focus must shift toward providing stable electricity, accessible credit facilities, localized processing industries, and security for agricultural corridors. Until our national conversations move past paper palliatives and small-scale survival strategies, our public discourse will remain trapped in a loop of uninspired ideas that yield zero developmental results.
Abubakar M. Kareto’s Bio
Abubakar M. Kareto is an independent public affairs analyst and strategic communications specialist, his focus are majorly on Continental, National and Sub-national Governance, Politics and Development. He can reached via amkareto@gmail.com
