The First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu
The First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu’s recent charge to Nigerian women to embrace productivity — by engaging in businesses like akara, kulikuli, and corn roasting — is not trivial. It is appropriate, practical, and deeply patriotic.
We mock what is small until we see what it becomes. Today, many of Nigeria’s biggest eateries and food brands began as hawkers. Some sold akara on street corners. Others hawked bread, amala, or even ‘eba kolobe’ — eba without soup. Those little drops have built empires.
Take Ibadan, for instance. Amala Sky, now one of the most popular amala joints in the country and located in elitist Bodija, did not start in a glass building. It started as a hawker inside Bodija Market. Mama Ope, another big eatery in the city, followed the same path. Like Amala Sky, she was simply hawking cooked rice in Mokola Market. I watched both women grow from trays and small stalls into entrepreneurs with branches stretching as far as Abuja today.
The North tells the same story with kulikuli and corn roasting. In Kano, Kaduna, and Zaria, women who began by frying small batches of kulikuli by the roadside now run packaged food businesses that supply supermarkets across the country. Those trades still have the capacity to build new ones if we take them seriously and scale them with dignity.
