The Akara Defense: When Compassion Becomes an Insult -By John Oyebanji

“We tried to give hope. To start akara business doesn’t take a lot of money, to start roasting corn… groundnut, kulikuli 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. What is within our hands, we have given, I have given, I keep giving, and those are the things we have done.”

Those were the words of Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Remi Tinubu, when confronted with the question of what the presidency has done to alleviate the crushing poverty now stalking every Nigerian household. She delivered them not with embarrassment but with evident satisfaction, the tone of a benefactress who believes she has more than discharged her duty to the suffering masses.

She has not, and Nigerians should not pretend otherwise. Let’s address the fire before the teaspoon.

Before we weigh her words on their own terms, we must first locate them in their proper economic context, because without that context, the statement floats in a vacuum of false benevolence.

Under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigerians have absorbed a sequence of policy shocks without precedent in recent memory. Fuel subsidy removal sent petrol prices from averagely ₦260 per litre to well above ₦1,000 overnight, without adequate palliative preparation, and with consequences that rippled through every sector of the economy. Transportation costs doubled and trebled. Food prices, already under pressure, went into freefall upward. The naira, deliberately floated, collapsed from around ₦460 to the dollar to well over ₦1,500, gutting savings, wiping out small business capital, and making imported goods, including raw materials for manufacturing prohibitively expensive.

Electricity tariffs for Band A consumers were increased by over 300%. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost as businesses unable to survive the combined pressure of energy costs, currency collapse, and depressed consumer spending have closed or downsized. Food inflation crossed 40%. Families that were managing before 2023 are now choosing between feeding their children and paying school fees. Families that were comfortable are now managing. Families that were poor are now destitute.

This is the fire President Tinubu lit, his wife arrived with a teaspoon of water and called it relief.

The First Lady speaks of grants, disbursed to poor Nigerians to start petty businesses. Some of her supporters have seized on this as evidence of a caring presidency reaching the grassroots. Let us subject it to the simplest economic scrutiny.

A 50kg bag of flour in Nigerian markets today costs upward of ₦80,000 to ₦100,000. A jerry can of palm oil or groundnut oil runs thousands of naira above what it cost two years ago. A gas cylinder refill, a basic frying pan set, a table and umbrella for a roadside stall, none of these, combined, fall within ₦50,000 at current market prices. The grant she celebrates as transformative cannot fully stock the very business she is recommending. It is not startup capital, it is, at best, a partial deposit on survival.

This is not a trivial accounting error, it goes to the heart of whether the administration understands, or cares to understand the actual texture of poverty it has helped manufacture. You cannot design a poverty relief program based on 2020 prices in a 2024-2025 economy and claim success. The numbers simply do not honour the suffering.

Then the place of charity or obligation? The language itself betrays the thinking. Perhaps the most revealing dimension of the First Lady’s statement is not what she said about akara, but how she framed the entire enterprise of giving.

“I have given, I keep giving.” “What is within our hands, we have given.”

This is the language of a patron, not a public official. It treats the disbursement of public resources as a personal act of generosity, as though the money flows from the Tinubu family’s private fortune rather than from the same national treasury that Nigerians fund with their taxes, their oil wealth, and the sweat of their daily labour. Government relief to the poor is not charity, it is constitutional obligation. It is not a gift from the powerful to the weak; it is the redistribution of what already belongs to the people.

When a First Lady speaks of “giving” public funds as though they are her personal endowment, she reveals a worldview rooted in feudal patronage, in the idea that the governed should be grateful to the governing for whatever crumbs fall from the table. This is precisely the political culture that has kept Nigeria poor, the confusion of state resources with personal benevolence, and the expectation that citizens perform gratitude for the bare minimum.

It should not need saying, but it evidently does that the Nigerian people are not supplicants before a monarch. They are citizens with rights. The First Lady’s language insults that citizenship.

Some who have rallied to the First Lady’s defense have invoked the dignity of labour. There is dignity in selling akara, they say. There is no shame in roasting corn or making kulikuli. These are honest trades, worthy trades, and we should not look down on them. This is true, and it is entirely beside the point.

No one is arguing that petty trading is undignified. The argument is that recommending petty trading as the government’s primary poverty response, in the absence of the structural conditions that make petty trading viable, is not a policy, it is a performance. Dignity in labour flourishes when energy is affordable, when transportation costs are not punishing, when markets are accessible, when raw material prices are stable, when the macro-economy gives the small trader a fighting chance. The Tinubu administration has undermined nearly every one of these conditions.

To tell a former civil servant who lost real purchasing power to inflation to go fry akara is not to affirm his dignity, it is to offer him a descent and dress it as an opportunity. It is to say: we have taken away the ladder, but here is a shorter ladder we are calling a gift.

Dignity in labour, properly understood, demands that the state create and sustain conditions in which labour can generate a living. That is the conversation Nigeria’s leadership needs to be having. Instead, we are being sold the romance of street food as a substitute for governance.

Let me equally address why this statement should not have come from her. That is one more dimension that must be addressed plainly, because politeness has allowed it to go unspoken for too long.

The moral authority to counsel the poor on petty trading must be earned, it cannot be assumed by proximity to power. A First Lady whose official lifestyle (state aircraft, international travel, high-profile events, the full apparatus of an office funded by the public) costs more per quarter than thousands of her supposed akara beneficiaries will earn in their lifetimes, has not earned that authority.

This is not an argument rooted in envy, it is an argument rooted in proportion and credibility. In moments of genuine national hardship, credibility is built through visible solidarity, through sacrifice, through accountability. When leaders and their spouses demonstrate by their own conduct that the hardship is shared, that they, too, are tightening belts, the people receive their words differently. When the conduct says one thing and the words say another, the disconnect does not go unnoticed. Nigerians are not foolish, they see.

The First Lady should not have made this statement not because the subject of poverty reduction is beneath her office, but because her office, as currently constituted, has not positioned her to speak to it with integrity. Her husband’s policies created this poverty wave. Her public lifestyle has not suggested personal acquaintance with it, and her solution (a grant that cannot buy its own startup stock) does not reflect any serious grappling with its scale.

However, the support the statement has attracted from some quarters deserves its own honest examination.

Some of those applauding are political loyalists whose material interests are inseparable from the administration’s survival. Their support is self-serving by definition and carries no moral weight.

Others are genuinely convinced that any effort is better than none, that imperfect relief is still relief. There is a sliver of truth here, good intentions, when they exist, are not nothing. But good intentions poorly executed, in the context of self-inflicted economic damage, are not a sufficient defense. We must hold government to the standard of outcomes, not merely of effort.

The most troubling category of supporters, however, are those whose expectations of government have been so systematically eroded over decades of misrule that ₦50,000 or #100, 000 akara grants genuinely feel like meaningful intervention. When a people have been governed so poorly for so long that they receive the crumbs as feast, the crisis is no longer merely economic, it is psychological. A citizenry that has internalised low expectations becomes, without intending to, complicit in its own neglect.

This is the long shadow of bad governance, it does not only damage the economy, it damages the imagination of what governance can and should be. It trains citizens to reduce their demands until the demands match the supply of failure.

We must resist that training.

Let us be constructive, because criticism without direction is its own kind of laziness. Real compassion from the First Lady’s platform, and it is a powerful platform would involve publicly naming the suffering her husband’s policies have caused and calling, clearly, for policy review and structural relief. It would involve championing the reversal or serious mitigation of the tariff and subsidy decisions that broke household budgets. It would mean pushing for a deliberate, adequately-funded palliative framework designed by economists, not publicists, one where the grant amounts actually correspond to current market realities, where the beneficiary selection is transparent, and where accountability mechanisms exist.

It would mean speaking to the Nigerian people not as a patron distributes tokens to a waiting crowd, but as a fellow citizen who understands that what has been taken from them is enormous, and that restoring it will require more than akara grants and good wishes.

It would mean, above all, abandoning the language of personal charity and embracing the language of state responsibility.

The First Lady’s statement, stripped of its theatrical warmth, is an admission of failure dressed as an accomplishment. After all the suffering, the petrol lines, the collapsed naira, the shuttered businesses, the hungry children, the vanished savings, the best the presidency can point to is pocket change and a suggestion to sell street food.

That is not a record to celebrate, it is a record to be ashamed of, and then, more importantly, to be urgently corrected.

Nigerians are among the most resilient people on earth. They will fry akara if they must, they will roast corn in the sun and sell groundnut by the roadside if survival demands it. They have always done what they must, but their resilience is not a license for their government to stop governing. Their endurance is not a substitute for policy, and their survival instincts are not an economic plan.

Nigeria deserves better, and every Nigerian who knows this, regardless of party, region, or religion has both the right and the responsibility to say so, clearly and without apology.

The akara defense has been heard, but it does not hold.

John Oyebanji is a Journalist, a historian, ordained minister, and civic commentator based in Modakeke, Osun State. He writes on public affairs, governance, and society, and can be reached via 09032201075 (WhatsApp).