The Sinister Side of Oluremi Tinubu’s ‘Entrepreneurial Citizenship’

The recent rhetoric of micro-entrepreneurship advanced by Nigeria’s first lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, harks back to longstanding assumptions about poverty in Africa while echoing a newer, more insidious discourse of entrepreneurial citizenship. Taken together, these narratives serve the interests of African governments and powerful external actors.

Written by Moses E. Ochonu

Jul 7, 2026

Photo Illustration by Dunsin Bankole / THE REPUBLIC.

On 26 June 2026, Nigeria’s first lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, set off a firestorm of controversy and outrage when she quipped at a public event that it doesn’t take much money to start a small roadside food business and proceeded to advise women to start akara, roasted corn and kulikuli businesses. The first lady humble-bragged about giving small micro-grants to women to start various food vending businesses. She might not have offered the advice in that spirit, but many Nigerians understood her comment as a quasi-presidential prescription for overcoming the prevailing hyperinflation and crushing hardship. The current economic predicament is widely blamed on her husband, the president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms. The capstone of those reforms was the simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira.

Many Nigerians read Sen. Tinubu’s statement as advancing akara and kulikuli informal business as an escape hatch from the current hard times, and its absence as the cause of their suffering. Nigerians thus saw escapism and deflection in her statement. Many commenters on social media wondered at the first lady’s audacity in recommending the lowliest of the informal trades as pipelines of survival in an economy in crisis. Others pointed to the wilful or Freudian failure to acknowledge how the current crisis came about. Sen. Tinubu’s case was not helped by her history of recommending other forms of self-help in periods of intense public outcry against her husband’s harsh economic policies. She once made a televised show of planting a small vegetable garden in Aso Rock, Nigeria’s presidential residence. She then used the garden as a prop to advise Nigerians to cushion food inflation by growing their own foods.

Against this background, Nigerians parsed the first lady’s words in multiple perspectival directions. Most, however, indicted her for insensitivity and hypocrisy, arguing that her family’s sheltered privileges made her message to poor Nigerian women dubious. Some Nigerians observed that her family’s life of opulence meant that none of her relatives would ever engage in honest paid employment, let alone the grind of informal akara hustle. It was thus convenient for her to mount the podium and deliver a haughty lecture to poor Nigerians on the empowering virtue of the informal culinary trade.

Nigerians, of course, love akara and kulikuli as snacks and in meals. The vocation of making akara was not the subject of their critique. After all, most Nigerians have familial connections to the country’s vibrant informal food and non-food trading and service economy. Rather, what Nigerians heard and critiqued was Sen. Tinubu’s failure to acknowledge, let alone take responsibility for, the worsening cost of living crisis. The akara selling statement was salt on a man-made injury, in the opinion of many commenters.

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About the Author

Moses E. Ochonu

is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History and professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He is author of the recently published book, Boko Haram: The Past of the Present Upheaval (University of California Press, 2026).

Websiteas.vanderbilt.edu

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The Sinister Side of Oluremi Tinubu’s ‘Entrepreneurial Citizenship’