By Abdulrauf Aliyu
There is an old story about two doctors standing over a critically ill patient. One insists the patient needs immediate surgery. The other delivers an eloquent lecture on the patient’s remarkable fighting spirit. The first speaks about the disease. The second speaks about the patient’s character. Both conversations may be interesting, but only one is actually treating the illness. That, in essence, captures the exchange between Abimbola Adelakun’s “The Unexamined Life of Sunday Dare” and Sunday Dare’s “The Unfiltered Mind of Abimbola Adelakun”. One interrogates Nigeria’s economic architecture. The other largely defends its moral narrative. They occasionally occupy the same room, but they are rarely having the same conversation.
At its core, Adelakun’s article is not about akara. It is not even about Remi Tinubu. It is about the dangerous romanticisation of poverty. Her argument is simple. Petty trading is a survival mechanism, not a national development strategy. She writes, “What we need from the APC is an agenda for national prosperity, not this endless almsgiving masquerading as economic policy.” That is the gravitational centre of her essay. Everything else, including Sunday Dare, Dangote, TraderMoni, and akara, merely orbits around it. Agree or disagree with her tone, but that central proposition deserves engagement, not diversion.
Sunday Dare’s reply, “The Unfiltered Mind of Abimbola Adelakun”, claims to be a rebuttal. In reality, it is often a character defence masquerading as policy analysis. Instead of confronting the structural questions Adelakun raises, Dare spends remarkable energy describing her as elitist, cynical, detached, arrogant, and imprisoned inside diaspora academia. Those descriptions may satisfy political loyalists, but they do not answer whether the Nigerian economic model is producing sustainable prosperity. To borrow from the Roman rhetoricians, this is ‘argumentum ad hominem’, meaning an argument directed at the person rather than the substance of the argument. It generates applause. It rarely generates clarity.
To Dare’s credit, he identifies one area where Adelakun arguably overstates her case. She writes as though empowerment programmes have become little more than sophisticated poverty recycling machines. While Nigeria’s record certainly justifies skepticism, evidence from countries such as Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Kenya demonstrates that carefully designed microfinance and enterprise support can improve household incomes under the right institutional conditions. So Dare is correct to insist that helping small entrepreneurs is not inherently foolish. Where he immediately loses the argument, however, is in pretending that this observation somehow refutes Adelakun’s larger point about failed economic structures. It does not.
Indeed, both writers surprisingly converge on one issue. They both desire an industrialised Nigeria. Adelakun explicitly calls for one “where multinational businesses absorb as many people as possible into formal employment.” Dare responds by agreeing, writing, “Adelakun calls for an industrialized Nigeria, and on that, we agree.” That convergence is important because it reveals that their disagreement is not over the destination. It is over the map. Adelakun believes structural transformation must precede mass prosperity. Dare believes millions of small enterprises collectively produce industrialisation. The first begins with institutions. The second begins with individuals.
This is precisely where Dare’s argument collapses under empirical scrutiny. He writes, “Industrialization is not an abstraction; it is the sum of millions of small, productive parts.” It sounds profound. It is also deeply incomplete and, taken literally, economically misleading. Industrialisation is not simply the arithmetic addition of countless small businesses. If it were, Nigeria would already rival Germany. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, micro, small, and medium enterprises account for the overwhelming majority of Nigerian businesses. Yet manufacturing contributes only a modest share of GDP, productivity remains low, exports remain largely primary commodities, and industrial capacity utilisation continues to fluctuate under severe infrastructural constraints. Millions of small businesses have existed for decades. Industrialisation has not automatically emerged from their numerical abundance.
History is equally unforgiving of Dare’s formulation. Britain did not industrialise because millions sold bread and candles. It industrialised because technological innovation, mechanisation, access to finance, secure property rights, transport infrastructure, legal institutions, and state capacity converged. South Korea did not become Samsung by encouraging more market stalls. It deliberately invested in education, heavy industry, ports, research, electricity, export discipline, and industrial policy. China did not become the world’s factory because everyone became a trader. It became the world’s factory because the state systematically integrated infrastructure, manufacturing clusters, logistics, finance, and global supply chains. Industrialisation has always been institutional before it becomes entrepreneurial.
Dare’s statement also reveals a conceptual confusion between hustling and entrepreneurship. The two are not synonymous. Hustling is activity undertaken primarily for immediate survival. Entrepreneurship is the organised deployment of capital, innovation, risk management, productivity, and scalability to create enduring value. An akara seller working fourteen hours daily to survive inflation is hustling. A food processing company building branded distribution networks, employing hundreds of workers, introducing new technologies, paying taxes, and accessing export markets is entrepreneurship. The distinction matters because public policy designed for survival rarely produces transformation.
Joseph Schumpeter, perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential economist on entrepreneurship, described entrepreneurs as agents of “creative destruction.” They reorganise markets, innovate, introduce new production methods, and transform industries. That definition extends far beyond simply buying and selling goods. Entrepreneurship is not measured by how early one wakes up or how many hours one labours. It is measured by value creation, innovation, productivity, and scale. By reducing entrepreneurship to the mere act of trading, Dare inadvertently empties the concept of its economic meaning.
His repeated invocation of Dangote further illustrates this oversimplification. Yes, Dangote started as a trader. So did many successful industrialists across the world. But Dangote did not become Africa’s richest man because he remained a trader. He became wealthy because he vertically integrated production, invested heavily in manufacturing, leveraged finance, exploited economies of scale, built logistics networks, and operated within strategic industrial sectors. To repeatedly tell Nigerians that Dangote “started as a trader” without explaining what came after is like telling medical students that every surgeon once held a scalpel. Technically true. Educationally useless.
The deeper weakness in Dare’s response lies in two well documented cognitive biases. The first is “survivorship bias”. He repeatedly highlights exceptional success stories while ignoring the overwhelming majority who followed identical paths without comparable outcomes. Public policy built around outliers is intellectually hazardous. Governments are expected to formulate policies around median outcomes, not statistical anomalies. Dangote is memorable precisely because millions of traders did not become Dangote.
The second is “optimism bias”, the systematic tendency to overestimate positive outcomes while underestimating structural obstacles. Dare appears genuinely convinced that resilience plus small capital naturally produces upward mobility. Unfortunately, evidence says otherwise. Entrepreneurs operating under unstable electricity, volatile exchange rates, weak consumer purchasing power, multiple taxation, poor logistics, regulatory inconsistency, insecurity, and inflation face significantly reduced probabilities of long term growth. Hope is psychologically valuable. It is not a substitute for macroeconomic stability.
Adelakun, however, also leaves an important conversation unfinished. She rightly criticises empowerment politics, but she pays insufficient attention to the institutional hostility facing firms that actually attempt to leave the informal economy. Registering a business is merely the beginning. Entrepreneurs then encounter inconsistent regulation, taxation from multiple government agencies, inadequate commercial dispute resolution, expensive financing, and unreliable infrastructure. In other words, many Nigerians remain informal not because they lack ambition but because formalisation often carries unbearable costs. That distinction deserved greater analytical attention.
My own position sits closer to Adelakun’s because she correctly identifies the disease rather than merely celebrating the patient’s endurance. Governments exist to reduce the cost of productivity, not to immortalise resilience. Nigerians should never have become so accustomed to surviving dysfunction that survival itself is mistaken for development. Every society contains hardworking people. Hard work alone has never guaranteed prosperity. Haiti has hardworking citizens. Somalia has hardworking citizens. Afghanistan has hardworking citizens. Prosperity emerges when productive citizens encounter productive institutions.
Several uncomfortable questions therefore remain unanswered. Why does Nigeria consistently celebrate the informal economy instead of measuring how rapidly citizens leave it? Why do political leaders praise street traders while sending their own children into formal corporate careers? Why do empowerment programmes rarely publish rigorous longitudinal impact evaluations five or ten years later? If petty trading is truly the engine of prosperity, why are developed countries not encouraging more roadside commerce rather than advanced manufacturing? Why should ordinary Nigerians embrace an economic pathway that political elites themselves rarely choose for their own families?
Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” The same wisdom applies to governments. Waste no more time arguing about hope. Build institutions that justify it. Waste no more time romanticising resilience. Remove the conditions that make resilience necessary. Waste no more time celebrating hustling. Build an economy where enterprise, innovation, productivity, and formal employment become the norm rather than the exception.
There is an African proverb that closes this debate better than any political speech can: “No matter how long the night, the day will surely break. But no farmer harvests because he prayed for sunrise alone. He must first prepare the soil.” Nigeria has celebrated the sunrise of hope for decades. It is time to ask who is preparing the soil.
