The Market Was Never a Gift. By Chidi Eke

The Market Was Never a Gift.

By Chidi Eke

Nigerian women once ruled the marketplace as sovereigns. The First Lady is offering them charity and calling it the same thing.
This week a video did what most official remarks never manage: it stopped the country mid-scroll. Standing before State House correspondents after the Renewed Hope Initiative’s quarterly meeting with the wives of state governors, the First Lady offered Nigerian women a route out of hardship. To start an akara business, she explained, “doesn’t take a lot of money.” Roasting corn, frying beans, kuli-kuli — small ventures, small capital. And the crucial detail, the one she clearly thought was the act of generosity: the money behind them was a grant, not a loan. A gift. Hope, dispensed from above.
The response was instant and the metaphor was unanimous. Marie Antoinette. Let them eat cake — or in the local register, let them fry akara.
It is a satisfying comparison, and it is the wrong one. Not only because it reaches for a French queen to explain a Nigerian failure, though that instinct — to borrow a foreign frame when the local one is sharper — is exactly the habit this publication exists to break. It is wrong because the Antoinette charge is the gentlest accusation available. It says the First Lady is out of touch. It assumes the problem is distance: that she simply does not know what a paint-bucket of beans costs in 2026, that a good briefing would fix it.
The problem is not distance. The problem is the theory of women folded inside the sentence — and that theory has a history in this country far more damning than any guillotine metaphor can carry.

*What the sentence actually says*

Strip the remark to its architecture. A woman holding an office that does not exist in the 1999 Constitution — the First Lady is nowhere in our law; the role is borrowed entirely from a husband’s power — convenes the wives of governors, who hold their own platform on precisely the same borrowed terms, to hand grants to selected women, who are then invited to be grateful. Every tier of that structure draws its authority from a man. And the future it imagines for the Nigerian woman is petty trade, presented not as a floor to climb up from but as a destination to give thanks for.
This is women as recipients of goodwill. A clientele.
It is the exact inverse of how Nigerian women once held economic power. And the inversion is not ancient, not buried in some pre-contact mist that requires an anthropologist to recover. It is sitting in the recent past — in an institution this very government parades as heritage.

*The throne in the marketplace*

In the essay that opened this thread, I argued that the Igbo dual-sex system gave women a parallel sphere of institutional authority: the mikiri, the women’s assembly, with its own enforcement and its own command over the local market — the Omu and her cabinet governing the marketplace as sovereign female ground, not as a courtesy extended by men. That was not an Igbo eccentricity. It was a West African grammar of power, and the Yoruba spoke it fluently.
Among the Yoruba, the market is the female domain, and it is governed. The Iyaloja — Mother of the Market — sits at the head of an entire chieftaincy of women: the Iyalode, the Iyalaje. These were not honorary sashes. The historical record is plain that their word in market and commercial matters carried the weight of the male chiefs’, and that the Babaloja, the Father of the Market, ranked beneath the Iyaloja, not above her. The market had a sovereign, and the sovereign was a woman, and she was not elected by a man’s largesse but raised up by the traders themselves and confirmed by the throne.
What did that sovereignty look like in practice, in living memory? Look at Alimotu Pelewura. As head of the Lagos market women in the colonial decades, she did not request grants; she commanded a constituency. When the colonial government moved to tax women and to fix the prices that fed Lagos, Pelewura mobilised the market women against it — the same political reflex that produced the Aba Women’s War of 1929 a few hundred miles east. Market women were not a vulnerable group to be uplifted. They were a bloc that governments had to negotiate with, and sometimes lost to.
Hold these two images side by side. The market woman of the archive: sovereign of an organised female institution, taxing, fining, setting prices, breaking governments. The Renewed Hope beneficiary: handed a grant, told that frying beans is within her reach, asked to renew her hope. One is power. The other is dependence, dressed in the borrowed robes of empowerment.
The Renewed Hope Initiative is not the dual-sex principle restored. It is its photographic negative: derivative female patronage, attached to male office, distributing alms downward — where the indigenous institution was autonomous female authority, generated from below, answerable to the women it represented.

*Whose inheritance this is*

Here is where the remark stops being merely tone-deaf and becomes something close to unbearable.
The woman who told Nigerian women to fry akara married into the single most powerful surviving lineage of that very institution.
Abibatu Mogaji — the President’s mother — was the Iyaloja-General. Before the title, she was the vocal leader of the Lagos market women’s association, successor to that same Alimotu Pelewura. They called her the market amazon. She did not climb out of poverty by frying beans on a grant; she built an importing business large enough to break the monopoly that Lebanese and Greek merchants held over Lagos Island, and forced the multinationals to register her as a distributor. She held real economic command, exercised through the Iyaloja office — the throne in the marketplace, occupied in the twentieth century by the President’s own mother.
That throne did not retire with her. It passed to the President’s daughter, who inherited the Lagos title and then did something the institution had never sanctioned: she announced herself “Iyaloja-General of Nigeria,” a national office that does not exist in Yoruba custom, by way of a social-media bio. She has since installed an “Iyaloja of Edo State” — a title alien to Benin, where the Oba publicly rejected it as foreign to their tradition. An office that for centuries was conferred from below, by the traders, was converted into a thing handed down from a family, and exported by decree into kingdoms that never asked for it.
So trace the line across three generations of one household. The grandmother: the institution at full strength — autonomous, self-made, sovereign over the market. The daughter: the institution captured — held by inheritance and self-declaration, deployed as a political instrument. And now the wife, from the summit of an office with no constitutional existence, who was herself installed last year as Yeye Asiwaju by borrowing her husband’s chieftaincy title: the institution abandoned altogether, replaced by a grant scheme that tells the Nigerian woman her horizon is kuli-kuli.
Sovereignty, then capture, then alms. The akara remark is not a gaffe. It is the sound an institution makes at the end of its hollowing.

*On dignity, since someone will raise it*

A chieftain of the President’s party has already defended the remark as sincere — honest advice, he says, meant to encourage self-reliance, twisted into abuse. Others have invoked the dignity of labour: there is no shame in akara, the trade is real, the margins are not nothing.
All of that is true, and none of it touches the argument.
No one is mocking the woman who fries akara. She is doing honest, hard, skilled work, and she deserves a great deal more respect than she gets. The objection was never to the trade. It is to the ceiling. There is a chasm between a woman who walks into the market as a sovereign of an institution that governs it, and a woman handed a grant and told that this — this, and not the import empire her would-be matriarch built — is what she should aspire to and be thankful for. Dignity of labour was never the question on the table. Institutional power was. And the people now invoking dignity are the custodians of the one institution that once gave Nigerian women that power, presiding over its decline.

*The archive was always there*

The cruelty of the akara remark is not that the First Lady forgot the suffering of ordinary Nigerians, though she did. It is that the model she could have invoked — the one that would have made her the most powerful advocate for Nigerian women in a generation — was sitting in her own family album. She did not have to import a development-agency theory of microenterprise grants. She married into the Iyaloja throne. The answer was at the dinner table.
She offered a gift instead.
But the market was never a gift. It was a throne — built, held, and defended by Nigerian women long before anyone thought to call it empowerment and hand it back to them in a grant envelope. The archive was always there. This time, it was her own.

Engineer Chidi Eke a public opinion commentator writes from Abuja Nigeria