By Olu Adekunle
When a country’s First Lady responds to a cost-of-living crisis by recommending akara, roasted corn and kulikuli as viable economic pathways, it is not simply a misstatement. It is an index of how far the political elite have drifted from the material realities of the citizens they claim to serve. The remarks attributed to Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu with whom I happen to share first names and the manner of their delivery, have drawn backlash precisely because they crystallize three persistent and painful pathologies of Nigeria’s ruling class: insensitivity, lack of creativity and institutional arrogance.
The substance of the suggestion is where the insensitivity begins. To propose micro-enterprises that require little capital, at a moment when inflation is eroding purchasing power, energy costs are prohibitive and access to credit remains structurally exclusionary, is to mistake survival tactics for economic policy. Nigerians have long engaged in small-scale trading, frying and roasting not by design but by necessity. To present these activities as a novel prescription is to ignore decades of lived experience in the informal sector, while offering nothing to address the constraints that keep those same traders in precarity: unreliable power, expensive inputs, poor market infrastructure and a regulatory environment that extracts more than it enables. The advice therefore reads less as policy and more as platitude, delivered to an audience that is already exhausted by the very conditions it describes.
Equally revealing was the manner in which public spending was framed. The statement suggested that “billions” had been deployed to support various causes such as the fight against TB. It was phrased in a way that implied personal benevolence rather than institutional responsibility. It also gave the impression that governance is being conducted as charity and that citizens should receive policy with gratitude rather than scrutiny. In a context where many households are calculating daily trade-offs between food and fuel, the casual invocation of large sums, paired with instructions to monetize hunger, produced the optics of elite detachment. Empathy cannot be performed through scale. It is demonstrated through comprehension and on that metric, the First Lady’s remarks failed.
The third issue is the claim that “we have done our best to encourage Nigerians.” This refrain has become the default posture of the APC-led government since 2015, repeated through subsidy removals without buffers, currency volatility without stabilization and food inflation without targeted relief. To invoke best efforts after a decade of declining living standards is to substitute rhetoric for accountability. It signals a government that has exhausted its intellectual repertoire and now expects commendation for inertia. The bar for performance has been lowered so consistently that even minimal motion is presented as achievement.
Underlying all of this is an arrogance of posture. The suggestion of low-capital hustles, delivered alongside references to vast sums, syncs neatly into a ruling-class worldview in which citizens are to be managed rather than engaged. It presumes a hierarchy of knowledge that those in power understand the problems and that those outside it should adapt without question. Accountability, consultation and policy innovation are displaced by instruction. The distance between Aso Villa and the average Nigerian market is therefore not only geographic or economic. It is epistemic.
Nigeria does not lack entrepreneurship. It lacks enabling conditions. It does not lack labor. It lacks imagination from those who govern. While more focused governments around the world are setting their sights on greater heights in tech, manufacturing, and industrialization, Nigerian leaders in 2026 are shamelessly reducing policy discourse to the frying of akara and the roasting of corn. If the policy imagination of the state is reducible to street-food entrepreneurship while systemic failures remain unaddressed, then akara economics will be recorded not as a plan, but as evidence. Evidence of insensitivity to hardship, of creative bankruptcy in the face of structural problems and of an arrogance that mistakes distance for authority.
Nigerians are not asking for culinary directives. They are asking for governance that matches the scale and complexity of their challenges. Until that is offered, the remarks will stand as a concise summary of a political class that believes the people are the problem, not the
policy.
OLU ADEKUNLE is a Public Policy Analyst/ Public Affairs Commentator.
