“We’re trying to give hope. To start akara business doesn’t take too much money; to start roasting corn or somebody even said kuli kuli, doesn’t take much. We didn’t give them a loan; we gave it to them as a grant. So we’ve encouraged Nigerians as best as we could.”
The above comments by Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, have generated predictable reactions. Some Nigerians dismissed them as insensitive to the economic realities confronting millions of households. Others defended them as practical encouragement for entrepreneurship in difficult times. Both responses, however, risk missing the larger issue. The real debate is not about akara or roasted corn. It is about what the language of those in positions of national influence reveals about their understanding of governance, constitutional responsibility and economic transformation.
This conversation deserves to rise above social media outrage because Senator Remi Tinubu is not an accidental public figure. Although the Office of the First Lady has no constitutional recognition or executive powers under the 1999 Constitution, she is a former three-term Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria who understands legislative oversight, public policy and the constitutional obligations of government. She is also widely perceived to exercise considerable informal influence within the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. When someone with that experience speaks about economic survival, it is reasonable to examine not only the words themselves but also the philosophy of governance they may reflect.
Her additional statement deserves equal attention. “What is within our hands, I have given, and I keep giving.” There is every reason to believe that this reflects genuine personal commitment. Throughout her years in public life, she has supported empowerment programmes, scholarships and humanitarian interventions. Such efforts have undoubtedly improved individual lives. Yet this is precisely where public policy must distinguish between charity and governance. Charity responds to immediate human needs. Governance removes the structural conditions that continually produce those needs. One is personal benevolence; the other is a constitutional obligation.
The Nigerian Constitution is remarkably clear about that obligation. Section 14(2)(b) declares that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” Section 16 directs the State to harness national resources, promote national prosperity, control the economy in a manner that secures the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen, and ensure suitable employment. Section 17(3)(a) goes even further by directing that government policy shall ensure that “all citizens, without discrimination, have the opportunity for securing adequate means of livelihood.” The operative word is opportunity. The Constitution does not envisage a State whose principal economic response is encouraging citizens to survive hardship. It envisages a developmental State that deliberately creates conditions in which citizens can prosper.
This constitutional philosophy is neither socialist nor laissez-faire capitalism. It reflects what scholars describe as a developmental constitutional state, one that recognises markets, encourages enterprise and private initiative, but simultaneously accepts responsibility for creating the institutional foundations upon which prosperity depends. In other words, the government is not expected to replace enterprise; it is expected to make enterprise productive.
This distinction is fundamental because there is absolutely nothing dishonourable about selling akara, roasting corn or engaging in any legitimate small business. Across Nigeria, millions of women and men have raised families, educated children and contributed to local economies through these enterprises. Honest work deserves dignity irrespective of scale. The issue is therefore not whether akara is respectable. The issue is whether survival enterprises should represent the highest economic aspiration communicated by those closest to the centre of political power.
Every successful economy has understood the difference between necessity entrepreneurship and opportunity entrepreneurship. Necessity entrepreneurs enter business because formal opportunities do not exist. Opportunity entrepreneurs establish businesses because the economic environment encourages innovation, investment and growth. The first reflects institutional failure; the second reflects institutional success. The responsibility of the government is to reduce necessity entrepreneurship by expanding opportunity entrepreneurship.
That is the productivity ladder upon which nations develop. Economies move from subsistence activities to micro-enterprises, from micro-enterprises to competitive small and medium enterprises, from SMEs to industrial production, and ultimately to innovation-driven knowledge economies. Public policy succeeds when citizens steadily climb this ladder. It fails when they remain permanently trapped on its lowest rungs.
History consistently supports this proposition. During the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not merely encourage unemployed Americans to create survival businesses. Through the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the government deliberately created employment, invested in infrastructure and expanded productive capacity. The objective was not simply to help citizens endure poverty but to rebuild an economy capable of eliminating it.
Singapore offers another illustration. Under Lee Kuan Yew, street hawking was never romanticised as the country’s economic future. Hawkers were organised into regulated food centres with better infrastructure while the government simultaneously invested aggressively in education, manufacturing, logistics, finance and technology. Street food survived as part of Singapore’s culture; poverty did not.
South Korea followed a similar trajectory. Rather than accepting subsistence livelihoods as permanent, deliberate industrial policies moved millions from low-productivity agriculture into globally competitive manufacturing. China likewise lifted hundreds of millions from poverty not by expanding informal trading but by building industrial ecosystems, infrastructure and export capacity. In each case, governments understood that resilience alone could never substitute for structural transformation.
Nigeria possesses no shortage of resilient citizens. If anything, resilience has become our defining national characteristic. Nigerians innovate under extraordinary constraints. But resilience should never become the measure of successful governance. Governments should be evaluated not by how creatively citizens adapt to hardship but by how effectively public institutions reduce the need for such adaptation.
The same institutional failures confront the university graduate, the software developer, the farmer and the manufacturer. Nigeria graduates hundreds of thousands of young people every year from universities, polytechnics and colleges. They study engineering, medicine, agriculture, computer science, architecture and law. Increasing numbers possess globally competitive digital skills. Yet too many enter an economy that offers limited opportunities to deploy those skills productively. It is difficult to justify asking a nation that invests heavily in higher education to define success primarily in terms of informal survival.
This is why public messaging matters. Governments communicate priorities not only through budgets and legislation but also through language. When national leaders consistently speak about innovation, industrialisation, research, exports, artificial intelligence, manufacturing and productivity, they signal confidence in the country’s future. When public discourse increasingly revolves around coping mechanisms and survival strategies, citizens inevitably question whether the ambition of government matches the potential of the nation.
Institutional economist Douglass North famously argued that institutions are “the rules of the game” that shape economic performance. Prosperity depends less on how hardworking citizens are than on the quality of the institutions within which they operate. Nigerians have already demonstrated that they are hardworking. What remains uncertain is whether our institutions consistently reward hard work with opportunity.
This is where charity reaches its natural limit. No First Lady, President, governor, philanthropist or charitable foundation possesses the resources to individually empower every struggling Nigerian. Nor should they be expected to. The constitutional role of government is not to become the nation’s largest charity organisation. It is to build institutions that progressively reduce citizens’ dependence on charity altogether.
Seen from this perspective, the debate triggered by Senator Remi Tinubu’s comments is much larger than one statement. It raises a fundamental question about the philosophy of governance in contemporary Nigeria. Are we gradually normalising survival as the highest expectation of citizenship, or are we deliberately building an economy that expands opportunity, productivity and prosperity?
The answer matters because language shapes policy, policy shapes institutions, and institutions shape national outcomes.
Hope remains indispensable in difficult times, and no responsible government should underestimate its importance. But hope without opportunity gradually loses credibility. Relief without reform eventually becomes repetitive. Personal generosity, however sincere, cannot substitute for institutional competence.
History ultimately judges governments not by the number of citizens they encourage to endure hardship, but by the number they empower to escape it. Nigeria’s constitutional promise is not merely that citizens should find creative ways to survive. It is that the government should create conditions in which talent, enterprise and hard work translate into prosperity.
The issue before us, therefore, is not akara. It never was. The issue is whether our economic imagination has become too small for a nation of over 230 million people with abundant natural resources, one of Africa’s largest markets and one of the world’s most entrepreneurial populations.
Nigeria deserves better than an economy organised around survival. It deserves one organised around opportunity. That is the difference between charity and governance, between relief and reform, and ultimately between managing poverty and ending it.
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John Onyeukwu, is a lawyer and public policy analyst with interdisciplinary expertise in law, governance, and institutional reform. He holds an LL.B (Hons) from Obafemi Awolowo University, an LL.M from the University of Lagos, and dual master’s degrees in Public Policy from the University of York and Central European University. He also earned a Mini-MBA. John has managed development projects on governance, public finance, civic engagement, and service delivery. He can be reached on john@apexlegal.com.ng
When borrowing from my wife came in handy