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It is often said that the pharmacist only manages sickness. He does not cure. Cure would mean a permanent solution. Knowing that your ailment can only be managed, not cured, suggests a certain kind of mental cruelty. But there exists another kind of cruelty which wears the mask of generosity. This sort presents itself at political rallies, distributes cash in small denominations, smiles warmly for the cameras, and then tells the assembled poor that their destiny lies in frying akara or roasting corn by the roadside. This is exactly the sort that our amiable First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, delivered to Nigerian women when she publicly recommended Akara frying, Kulikuli production, and corn roasting as viable pathways out of poverty.
Those may not be bad after all. Many of us were raised by mothers who hacked kulikuli or sold roasted corn. But for a nation sitting atop the largest crude oil reserves in Africa, endowed with vast arable land, a vibrant and tech-savvy youth population, and vast untapped mineral wealth, the First Lady’s vision for the Nigerian woman is the tray, the charcoal stove, and tripod burner in the street corner under excruciating sun or downpour, often without umbrella or shed. This is not a development agenda. It is an insult dressed as compassion.
Note that Mrs Tinubu’s remarks were not made in isolation. They came amidst the distribution of N50,000 as grants to groups of women. For her, that was a gesture of support. To her admirers, it was philanthropy in action. But to any serious student of Nigerian political economy, it was something far more familiar and far more sinister. It was the latest version of a vote-buying infrastructure that has defined APC’s relationship with Nigeria’s poor since 2019. The name has changed, and the packaging has evolved to larger sizes, but the logic remains the same. The consequences? Devastating!
Come with me! Cast your mind back to 2019, when the Muhammadu Buhari administration, in the months preceding the 2019 general election, launched what it called the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme, a flagship of the National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA), which evolved such schemes as TraderMoni. The scheme promised interest-free loans of between N10,000 to petty traders and artisans across the country. Alongside it came ArtisanMoni and MarketMoni, each targeting a slightly different demographic of the economically chastised. Billions of naira were mobilised and shared at political rallies. Crowds gathered. Money changed hands. Photographs were taken. Politicians smiled. But the poor sank deeper into poverty.
What followed those billions? An audit commissioned by the incoming Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration conceded that the social investment programmes of the Buhari era were poorly targeted, riddled with duplication, and incapable of demonstrating measurable poverty reduction outcomes. The World Bank, in successive Nigeria Development Updates, documented that extreme poverty in Nigeria actually increased during the same period these schemes were operational. By 2023, Nigeria had overtaken India to become the world’s poverty capital, with over 140 million Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). As a matter of fact, TraderMoni did not lift Nigerians out of poverty. It only purchased temporary political support and left the structural roots of destitution entirely undisturbed. In May 2026, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) declared the woman who supervised the ministry, Sadiya Umar Farouq, wanted over her alleged involvement in a ₦37.1 billion fraud case linked to alleged embezzlement of humanitarian and social intervention funds.
Fast-forward to Mrs Tinubu, who approached her fellow women with N50,000 grants. In the current inflationary environment imposed on the country by her husband’s economic policies, N50,000 cannot sustain a family of four for more than 24 hours, with all necessary expenditures calculated, including medicine, food, shelter, clothing, and utility bills. Interestingly, she pegs this grant with advice to fry Akara, kuli-kuli, or roast corn. The continuity is not accidental. It is architectural. The APC has mastered the art of substituting spectacle for substance, of making the performance of poverty alleviation serve the interests of those in power while changing nothing for those in need. The N50,000 is not a development intervention. It is perpetuation of poverty masked as empowerment. It is proof of the instrumentation of the poor.
Look at it this way: Nigeria earned over $35 billion in oil revenues in 2023 alone as a petro-dollar economy. The country sits on commercial quantities of gold, lithium, bitumen, iron ore, and coal. Its agricultural potential, with about 84 million hectares of arable land, is the envy of the continent. Nigeria has produced intellectual giants, world-class surgeons, technology founders, and globally recognised professionals in every field imaginable. Its women, in particular, have demonstrated remarkable resilience and enterprise in the face of systemic neglect. They have shown dexterity in running businesses, raising families, and holding communities together, often without the support of the state. Their vision cannot be corn roasting as recommended.
The suggestion, to my mind, is that for all the rhetoric of women’s empowerment, the administration’s actual imagination of the Nigerian woman’s economic future extends no further than the roadside kiosk. It says that the policies required to create the conditions for genuine female economic participation, such as accessible credit, functional power supply, digitised land titling, publicly funded vocational training, gender-responsive procurement, and industrialisation, are simply not on the agenda. What it is, its merely a photo opportunity.
Get my meaning! Small-scale informal trade is not inherently demeaning. Millions of Nigerians sustain themselves through it with dignity. My mother did too. The problem, however, is when a government, rather than building the infrastructure and policies that allow these traders to scale, formalise, and prosper, treats informal petty trade as the ceiling of aspiration for the poor. When the state’s answer to women’s poverty is to hand them a frying pan rather than fix gas supply to their homes, extend credit facilities, or create technical schools for women, it has not empowered them. Rather, it has institutionalised their marginalisation while wearing the face of benevolence.
Interestingly, this prescription came at a time when the APC’s empowerment machinery distributed SUVs to the big women of the party as a mark of political favour. Again, this is not accidental but structural because the political economy of the Nigerian patronage system operates on strict hierarchy. Those at the top of the pyramid receive assets while those at the bottom receive cash for consumption and to sustain their poverty. This is not empowerment. This is the reproduction of inequality, and it is financed, in part, by the same public resources that TraderMoni, ArtisanMoni, and their successors drew upon.
See, Nigeria’s poverty crisis is not a mystery. Its causes are well-documented, and its solutions are not unknown. Poverty in Nigeria is driven by decades of under-investment in education and healthcare, by the collapse of manufacturing that once employed hundreds of thousands, by land tenure insecurity that prevents agricultural commercialisation, by a financial system that systematically excludes women, by infrastructure deficits that raise the cost of doing business to prohibitive levels, and by governance failures that divert public resources into private pockets. Frying akara, kulikuli or roasting corn solves none of these problems. A N50,000 grant dissolves against them like salt in a flood. Like palliatives, such grants are tailored to perpetuate the poverty of the poor and keep them within reach as instruments.
The first lady is not an unintelligent woman. She is a woman of considerable influence, and understands the mechanisms of power. She knows that what the Nigerian woman needs is an electricity grid that works, land rights that are legally enforceable and practically accessible; public schools that produce graduates who can compete in the knowledge economy. She understands that they need hospitals where maternal mortality no longer scares, and a judicial system that is blind indeed.
She also knows that Nigeria is not a poor country, but one repeatedly and catastrophically governed by leaders who benefit from the poverty of its people. The billions spent on TraderMoni did not empower Nigeria’s traders. They empowered votes for APC in 2019. The N50,000 grants she distributed will, in the same manner, not liberate the beneficiaries. They will only serve an electoral objective. While they do just that, the structural conditions that make akara frying, corn roasting or kulikuli production the only visible option for millions of Nigerian women will remain carefully preserved by the very class that arrives at rallies to photograph itself handing out cash. It is about sustainable poverty, period!
