(Dr. Ope Banwo, Mayor of Fadeyi, responds to those who believe yesterday’s survival strategies of kuli kuli and Iya Eleja are the answer to today’s youth unemployment crisis.)
I have spent the past 24 hours and more reading hundreds of comments from people responding to my video criticizing the First Lady’s suggestion that young Nigerians should embrace businesses like akara and kuli-kuli as the solution to unemployment.
The most common responses have gone something like this:
“My mother sold akara to send me to school.”
“My mother sold fish and was able to feed and educate all six of us.”
“My mother was an Iya Eleja and a Mama Oni Wosi-Wosi. May God bless her for her hustle in raising us. Madam Tinubu was right to recommend the same thing to today’s youths, who are simply too lazy.”
“Selling akara is how my mother sent all of us to university.”
Every time I read those comments, I smile. Not because I disagree with the stories.
Far from it.
I smile because I think many people have completely misunderstood both my argument and the larger issue raised by Mrs. Tinubu’s comments and the reactions of those defending them.
So let me say something that should not even need saying: I have nothing but admiration for those women.
The Iya Elejas.
The Mama Oni Wosi-Wosis.
The women who woke up before dawn to light charcoal fires while the rest of the family slept.
The women who stood for hours under the scorching sun in crowded markets.
The women who sold tomatoes, pepper, fish, akara, bean cakes, kuli-kuli, roasted corn, fruits, and whatever honest trade they could find just to make sure their children wore school uniforms and stayed in school.
Those women were giants. They were heroes.and My own mother, ‘MAMA MOSUN’, was one of those heroes.
My mother, mama Mosun, sold wosi-wosi on the streets of Fadeyi. I still remember watching officials from the town council arrive without warning to demolish her roadside omolanke stall and cart away her pineapples and oranges because, they said, she did not have a licence to trade there.
So please, don’t tell me about your Iya Eleja mother or your Mama Alakara mother as though I know nothing about the sacrifices of that generation.
I was raised by one. Right there in the streets of Fadeyi – Lagos right until she died in my 14th birthday
Many of us became lawyers, doctors, professors, engineers, bankers, entrepreneurs, and professionals because of the sacrifices those women made.
They deserve monuments.
They deserve our gratitude.
They deserve our everlasting respect.
But their struggles fifty years ago should not become Nigeria’s employment policy in 2026.
That is where many people completely miss the point.
There is an enormous difference between the Nigeria of the 1970s and 1980s and the Nigeria of today. Comparing the two as though nothing has changed is simply misguided.
Let me paint two pictures.
Picture a mother in Lagos in 1976.
She wakes up at 4:30 every morning.
She fries akara before sunrise.
By seven o’clock she has sold enough to put food on the table.
Her son attends a public school where education costs almost nothing.
Years later, he gains admission into university.
He receives bursary support throughout his education.
The university cafeteria serves decent meals that both the child of Iya Eleja and the child of the wealthy businessman can afford to eat at the same table. For less than one naira, students could eat three square meals a day, and many even enjoyed ice cream on Sundays.
His lecturers actually teach.
His mother earns enough from her small business to give him pocket money so he can focus on his studies instead of worrying about survival. He does not have to sell recharge cards, become an online scammer, or hustle endlessly just to remain in school.
When he graduates, employers are looking for graduates like him.
Within months, he secures a respectable job—perhaps even with an official Volkswagen Beetle or Peugeot 504 attached to the position.
That mother’s akara business was never intended to employ an entire generation.
It was simply the bridge that carried one family into a better future.
Now fast-forward fifty years….
Another mother wakes up before dawn.
She fries akara with exactly the same determination.
But this time, her son attends a university with no affordable cafeteria, little or no bursary support, unreliable lectures, and repeated strikes that stretch a four-year course into six years or more.
He graduates into an economy with tens of millions of unemployed young people competing for very few opportunities.
His classrooms are overcrowded.
Electricity is unreliable.
Clean drinking water is a luxury.
His lecturers spend months on strike.
His degree is no longer a guarantee of employment.
Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries around the world, yet he does not even own a laptop that allows him to compete in the digital economy.
Technology has opened opportunities that never existed fifty years ago.
Companies now hire talent from across the world.
Yet someone looks at that young man and says: “Go and do what your grandmother did.”
Think about that for a moment.
The very generation that was supposed to hand over a brighter future than the one they inherited is now telling today’s youth to return to the survival strategies of their grandmothers.
Worse still, some members of that generation now accuse these young people of being lazy or proud because they are questioning whether selling akara and kuli-kuli should be presented as the solution to one of the worst unemployment crises in Nigeria’s history.
Really?
After fifty years of progress…Is this truly the best vision we have for Nigeria’s youth?
You see, this debate is not about akara.
It is not about kuli-kuli.
And it is certainly not about looking down on honest work.
Every honest business deserves respect.
The issue is much bigger than that.
It is about imagination versus escape into the past for solutions to the present.
It is about visionary leadership or lack thereof
It is about whether a nation of over 200 million people, with more than 40 million unemployed youths, should be thinking like a village economy or like the largest Black nation on earth.
Countries around the world are training their young people in Artificial Intelligence.
In robotics.
In software engineering.
In cybersecurity.
In biotechnology.
In digital marketing.
In global freelancing.
In animation.
In advanced manufacturing.
In renewable energy.
But we are telling our own children to go and sell wosi-wosi, akara, and kuli-kuli.
Nations around the world are creating ecosystems where one skilled young person can work for clients in London while living in Lagos.
Where a software developer in Ibadan can earn dollars from Silicon Valley.
Where a graphic designer in Kano can serve companies in Australia.
Where a content creator in Enugu can build a global business with nothing more than talent, discipline, and an internet connection.
That is where the world is going. Yet we want our children to go back to 1970 and sell wosi-wosi and kuli-kuli like their grandmothers did.
What exactly is wrong with us?
So forgive me if I refuse to celebrate akara or kuli kuli as Nigeria’s national employment strategy.
Our mothers sold akara because they had no better options. Our leaders recommend akara because they have failed to create better options.
Those are not the same thing.
One deserves admiration.The other deserves questioning.
Every generation has a responsibility to leave the next generation with a better ladder than the one it climbed.
Our parents did not struggle so that we could preserve their struggles. They struggled so that their children would never have to repeat them.
That is what progress means.
So when people tell me, “My mother sold akara to send me to school,”
I simply reply, “Wonderful”. Mine did too.
Mine also sold fruits, grapes, and wosi-wosi including running pepper soup joints to survive. She belonged to a generation of extraordinary women who sacrificed beyond measure.”
Then I ask one simple question: After everything your mother suffered to give you a better life, is your dream really to tell your own children to go back and start where she started?
That is not honouring our mothers. That is wasting their sacrifices.
Nigeria does not honour our mothers by asking our children to relive their struggles.
Nigeria honours them by building a country where no child is forced into survival because leadership failed to create opportunity.
Iya Eleja was a hero.
Mama Oni Wosi-Wosi was a hero.
My own Mama Mosun in grapefruit and oranges and pepper soup joint was a hero to me too
But heroes belong in our history books.
Their sacrifices should inspire our values—not become our economic blueprint.
Their occupations, in a completely different economic era, with different economic realties and lack of mass unemployment situation, should not become the model for solving 40 million youth unemployment in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
Our mothers gave us survival. But Our leaders owe our children opportunity.
Those are not the same thing.
So, to everyone who has been writing to tell me how great their mothers were as Iya Elejas or Mama Oni Wosi-Wosis, let me repeat: That is not the point.
The point is that you cannot solve the problem of over 40 million unemployed youths by clinging to the survival strategies of the 1970s—a time when fresh graduates could often expect to find employment within a relatively short period after leaving school.
Please stop romanticizing the struggles of our parents.
Their survival occupations in the 1970s and 1980s should not become the template for solving the unemployment crisis of 2026.
I stand by my original video.
My argument has never been against small businesses. In fact, I believe small businesses will remain one of the biggest solutions to mass unemployment.
But our leaders must raise their imagination on what kind of small business to recommend for the children under their watch.
The Awolowos of this world ensured that the children under their watch got better opportunities by providing free education so they can be engines of the future of nigeria that our fathers became.
Now that we have inherited 40 million unemployed youths, we can’t be talking about kuli kuli or akara business . We need to think deeper and higher
We must create and promote the kinds of modern small businesses that can genuinely absorb millions of young Nigerians and compete in today’s global economy—not simply recycle yesterday’s survival strategies as tomorrow’s economic vision.
That is the conversation we should be having.
That is the Nigeria our mothers sacrificed for. And that is the Nigeria our children deserve.
Let the conversation continue
— Dr. Ope Banwo
Mayor Of Fadeyi
Founder, Naija Lives Matter
