By Michael Chibuzo
Nigeria’s First Lady, Sen. Oluremi Tinubu recently made some comments which triggered viral reactions by different sections of Nigeria’s vocal online court. The First Lady while speaking on the activities of her pet project, the Renewed Hope Initiative, said that the programme has been providing grants, rather than loans, to vulnerable Nigerians to help them start businesses and improve their livelihoods and that she has personally supported several causes with substantial donations in healthcare, education, agriculture, ICT training and social investment.
She said, “we are trying to give hope, and to start Akara business doesn’t take a lot of money. To start roasting corn, or somebody even said kuli kuli doesn’t take much. We didn’t give it to them as a loan; we gave it to them as a grant.
“So we’ve encouraged Nigerians as best as we could. What is within our hands, I have given, and I keep giving. I remember giving for TB (tuberculosis). When I heard there were so many TB cases, I gave N2 billion. To breast cancer, I gave a billion. For food malnutrition, I gave half a billion…”
As usual, critics went to town with their own narrative and began expressing hypocritical outrage over the akara and kulikuli comment by the First Lady. When I sampled the opinions of many of those mocking what the First Lady said, three things dawned on me:
1. Many Nigerians underestimate small scale businesses
The mere fact that a lot of people think akara or kulikuli business is not worth doing or worth empowering people to start, shows how a lot of Nigerians, especially those who think they are educated graduates, underestimate the importance and contribution of small scale businesses, like akara or kulikuli production, to our overall national productivity and poverty alleviation.
It will shock many of these critics who may be earning around N100,000 in monthly salary to discover that many akara or kulikuli sellers make more income from their trade than them who wait on their employers to pay them between N70,000 to N100, 000 monthly. An akara seller can make an average of N5000 net profit every day. If the person opens six days a week, that is about N120,000 a month income.
Akara business, just like other small scale businesses many people engage in such as roasting of corn, roadside beans and bole, fruit salad or smoothie business, does not require a very huge capital outlay to start. Sometimes a seed capital of N100,000 is enough to start some of these micro businesses. Millions of very poor Nigerians are unable to access this little capital. Ironically many of those blindly criticising the first lady hail one of the presidential candidates who always talks about supporting micro, small and medium scale enterprises with capital as low as N10,000.
2. Hypocrisy and entitlement mentality among many Nigerians hinder them from being productive
One fact about life is that everyone cannot be a medical doctor, IT engineer, software developer, CEO of blue-chip companies or owner of a large supermarket chain. It is good to aspire to be an Elon Musk or an Aliko Dangote, unfortunately life cannot make everyone billionaires overnight due to various factors. Sometimes you have to start somewhere small, then grow your enterprise to a larger scale.
Unfortunately, many in Nigeria are not willing to start small. They belittle akara business but still leave their homes most mornings or in the evening to buy akara and fries down the street, which serve as either their breakfast or dinner. This category of critics do not see empowerment of very poor people with micro capital to start micro and small businesses as meaningful.
To these critics, empowerment (even from private individuals) is empowerment only when beneficiaries are given millions of Naira as grants. Yet, you find them in the middle of every social media giveaway post begging for as little as urgent N5000 or N20,000 giveaways, sometimes writing epistles on how N20,000 will help them start or support their small businesses. That is a bad entitlement mentality garnished with hypocrisy.
The hypocrisy becomes loud when you see how these critics conveniently left out the other areas of support the First Lady mentioned such as billions of naira support to combat tuberculosis, breast cancer and malnutrition as well as the various agricultural support, IT training etc that her private pet project (and not the federal government) has also embarked on nationwide.
3. A lot of people are clueless about how to lift people out of poverty
One of the biggest misconceptions in Nigeria is the belief that poverty reduction begins with handing every poor person a white-collar job or millions of naira in grants. Unfortunately, that is simply not how development economics works.
No country has lifted millions of people out of poverty by waiting for everyone to become bankers, engineers or rocket scientists. A lot of countries that have achieved substantial reduction in their level of poverty including our favourite China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia, did so by enabling millions of people to engage in productive economic activities, however small those activities initially were.
Development is a cumulative process. For instance, a woman who starts by frying akara today may tomorrow own a restaurant. A roadside corn seller may eventually establish a food processing business. Many of Nigeria’s successful entrepreneurs did not start with factories, some started with one shop, one machine or even one table in a local market.
This is why microfinance, cooperative societies and microenterprise grants exist across the world. Governments, NGOs and international development agencies understand that a relatively small amount of capital can be transformative when placed in the hands of someone who already possesses the willingness to work and patiently grow an enterprise. This will not make any sense to those who want to get rich overnight.
Unfortunately, social media has conditioned many Nigerians to believe that empowerment is only meaningful when it comes in the form of several millions of naira. Yet, the overwhelming majority of businesses in Nigeria are micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). These MSMEs account for most employment in the country and sustain millions of households every day.
If you look at the total number of people that all the commercial banks in Nigeria employ directly, they are not up to 100,000 people. The so-called blue-chip companies in Nigeria also do not employ so much people. MTN employs less than 2500 people directly. The entire Dangote group which includes both the oil refinery, cement factories and sugar refinery employ less than 50,000 people directly. The three tiers of government in Nigeria have a combined workforce less than 10 million.
So, it becomes obvious that majority of Nigerians, as it’s the case elsewhere, eke out their living through micro, small and medium scale enterprises either as farmers, petty traders, artisans etc.
We must realise that poverty reduction requires multiple layers of intervention, both by governments at all levels and by private individuals or charity organisations like the First Lady’s pet project. Some people need access to credit. Others need vocational training, healthcare, quality education, infrastructure, agricultural support or digital skills. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
To the professional critics, who cannot proffer alternative solutions, I must remind them that there is dignity in honest labour. There is dignity in every business that legitimately feeds a family, pays school fees and contributes to economic activity. We cannot claim to care about poverty while simultaneously insulting the very occupations through which millions of poor Nigerians survive.
The debate should never have been about akara, roasted corn or kulikuli. It should have been about whether the grants or the other interventions of the First Lady’s private pet project genuinely improve livelihoods of the beneficiaries and how these types of interventions should become more widespread. We don’t need the hypocritical outrage from people who cannot proffer practical solutions to our poverty crisis.
Finally, until we begin to respect productive work at every level, not minding whether someone is a roadside akara seller or the owner of a manufacturing company, we will continue to misunderstand both the nature of poverty and the pathways out of it. And the worst kind of poverty a nation can be cursed with is not really the conventional poverty we know of, it is the poverty of public debate!