Written by Azeez Elijah Olawale
elijah.azeez@nln.gov.ng
"The same fire that fries akara can light up an economy — but only if you stop scrolling long enough to see it."
The morning Nigeria woke up to akara and completely missed breakfast
It started, as most Nigerian storms do, on a smartphone screen.
A few words from Nigeria's First Lady, a gentle nudge encouraging women to explore income through selling akara and kilishi, ignited a wildfire that burned across X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram Reels, WhatsApp groups, and TikTok comment sections. Within hours, the memes were flying. The jokes were rolling. The outrage was dressed in the finest sarcasm Nigerian wit could tailor. The phrase "sell akara" became a punchline, a political weapon, and a trending hashtag, all before most people had even read the full statement.
And therein lies the tragedy.
Not in the First Lady's words. Not in akara itself that golden, protein-rich, deeply Nigerian breakfast food that has fed generations and bankrolled countless households. The tragedy lies in what Nigeria did with the message: it distorted it, mocked it, forwarded it, and moved on without pausing for a single second to read between the lines.
We laughed. We shared. We lost.
Nigeria has a reading problem and social media is exploiting it
Let me be direct with you, as a librarian who has spent years watching the relationship between Nigerians and information slowly deteriorate. We are in a reading crisis. Not just a crisis of literacy — Nigerians are educated, eloquent, and extraordinarily creative. The crisis is one of deep reading: the ability to sit with a piece of information, analyse it in context, weigh its intent, and extract meaning beyond the surface. It is the difference between seeing words and understanding them. Between consuming content and thinking about it.
The akara debate is exhibit A.
What the First Lady said, stripped of its political context and media packaging, was essentially this: the informal economy is viable; small-scale food businesses are legitimate pathways to financial independence; women especially should not overlook what is close to them. Globally, that is not a controversial message. Street food economies generate billions of dollars annually. In countries like Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, and Mexico, small food enterprises are celebrated as economic backbone. Entrepreneurship seminars charge ₦50,000 per seat to tell people the same thing.
But Nigerians never got to that interpretation. Why? Because social media didn't give them the time.
The mechanics of a lie: misinformation vs. malinformation
To understand what happened, we need to understand two terms every Nigerian should know.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information spread without the deliberate intent to deceive. It is the person who shares a clipped video without watching it fully. The commenter who reads only the headline. The WhatsApp aunt who forwards without verifying. Misinformation is not always malicious, it is often simply lazy.
Malinformation, on the other hand, is information that is technically true but weaponised to mislead. It is a real quote, taken out of context. A real video, stripped of its before and after. A real statement, reframed to provoke outrage. This is the more dangerous cousin, because it hides behind the shield of partial truth.
What happened with the First Lady's statement was a masterclass in malinformation. The words "sell akara" were real. The context, a broader conversation about women's economic empowerment and entrepreneurship, was surgically removed. And what was left? A sound bite. A trigger. An opportunity for outrage. Social media algorithms, designed not to inform you but to engage you, did the rest. Because here is what platforms like X and TikTok know that your secondary school teacher never told you: anger travels faster than accuracy. A post that makes you furious gets shared three times more than a post that makes you think. Outrage is the oil that keeps the algorithm engine running, and your attention is the fuel it burns.
So Nigeria reacted. Loudly. Brilliantly. Hilariously. And completely missed the point.
What we lost while we were laughing
Here is what the scroll-and-react culture cost Nigeria in the days and weeks of the akara debate.
Nigeria's informal sector accounts for over 57% of GDP and employs more than 80% of the workforce, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. Akara sellers, kilishi vendors, boli roasters, and suya mallams are not economic footnotes. They are the economy. A national conversation about formalising, scaling, and dignifying that sector was buried under a mountain of memes.
We lost a conversation about women and financial independence. The core of the message, that women should not be ashamed of small-scale entrepreneurship as a starting point was drowned before it could swim. In a country where women-owned microenterprises consistently reinvest more into households and communities than their male counterparts, that conversation had real stakes. And most critically, we lost a conversation about reading culture itself. How many Nigerians, in the middle of sharing that akara meme, stopped to ask: Did I read the full speech? Do I have the full context? Am I reacting to the message or to someone else's reaction to the message?
Very few. And that is the most expensive loss of all.
The library is still open but nobody is coming in
I write this as someone who works in a national institution built on the radical idea that information, properly understood, is power. The National Library of Nigeria exists so that every citizen can access verified, curated, contextual knowledge the kind of information that does not disappear when a trend moves on, and does not change its headline based on who is sharing it. But we are watching a generation raised not on books, but on bytes, on content designed to be consumed in under thirty seconds, engineered to provoke rather than to inform, monetised on the basis of how long it can hold your attention before you feel something sharp enough to forward it.
Reading — real reading — builds patience. Critical distance. The ability to hold two ideas in tension and evaluate them. The capacity to hear something you disagree with and ask why before you ask who. A society that reads carefully does not distort messages. It interrogates them. It does not forward without thinking. It pauses. It asks: What is the source? What is the context? What is being left out? Who benefits from my outrage? These are not abstract academic questions. They are survival skills for the information age and Nigeria is entering that age underprepared.
Akara is a business. Let us talk about that.
Let me, for a moment, do what the meme merchants refused to do: take the entrepreneurship message seriously. A roadside akara seller in Lagos, operating between 6am and 10am, can sell between 100 and 300 pieces daily at ₦100–₦200 per piece. That is ₦10,000 to ₦60,000 per day, from a four-hour morning operation. Scale it. Formalise it. Brand it. Package it for offices, schools, or catering. Add digital ordering. Create a supply chain for bean paste. Train other women. Register a business.
Suddenly, you are not selling akara. You are running a food enterprise.
This is not a fantasy. This is exactly how many of Nigeria's most successful SMEs started not in an air-conditioned office with venture capital, but with a tray, a stove, and the audacity to begin. The same applies to kilishi the spiced, dried meat delicacy from Northern Nigeria that has become a luxury snack in cities and is exported across West Africa. The people in that value chain are not waiting for a government job. They are building.
But Nigeria was too busy laughing at the suggestion to notice.
What critical information consumption looks like: the PAUSE protocol
As a digital librarian, my job is not just to guard books. It is to equip citizens with the tools to navigate information because in 2026, the most dangerous weapon is not a gun. It is a poorly sourced viral post.
Here is a simple framework — the PAUSE Protocol — for every piece of information you encounter online:
P — Provenance. Where did this come from? Who said it, originally, in full?
A — Accuracy. Is the claim backed by verifiable facts? Can you find a primary source?
U — Understanding context. What was said before and after? What was the setting? Who was the audience?
S — Selective presentation. What has been left out? Is this the full picture or a cropped version?
E — Effect. How does this make you feel, and why? Is that feeling being manufactured?
If more Nigerians had applied even two of these steps to the First Lady's statement, the national conversation would have looked very different. We might have been debating food enterprise policy, small business grants, women's cooperatives, and digital market access for street food vendors. Instead, we debated a meme.
A nation that cannot read its opportunities is a nation that will always be poor
Nigeria is a country of extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit. Walk through Alaba Market, Onitsha Main Market, Wuse Market, or Balogun Market, and you will see capitalism in its rawest, most ingenious form. Nigerians hustle. Nigerians create. Nigerians find opportunity in the most improbable places. But that spirit is being quietly suffocated by a culture of reactive consumption where we respond before we reflect, where we share before we verify, where we perform outrage before we pursue understanding.
The First Lady said: start something. Nigeria heard: insult. And in the space between those two things, in that gap of misreading, misrepresentation, and missed meaning, an unknown number of potential entrepreneurs lost a nudge that might have changed their lives.
The librarian's charge
There is a reason libraries have existed for thousands of years, from Alexandria to Timbuktu — yes, Timbuktu, where West Africa's own scholars preserved knowledge in manuscripts that still speak to us today. Libraries exist because humanity, at its wisest, understood that information without curation is noise. That knowledge without context is dangerous. That reading,careful, slow, critical reading is one of the most radical acts a person can perform in any era, but especially in this one.
My charge to you, student, entrepreneur, professional, politician, trader, or creative is simple: Read more. Forward less. Seek the source. Question the summary. Find the message beneath the meme.
Because the next great Nigerian business idea might be wrapped in a statement that your timeline is already mocking. The next policy that could transform your community might be buried under a sarcastic quote tweet. The next conversation that could change your trajectory might be the one Nigeria decided was too boring to trend.
Akara is still sizzling on the fire.
The question is whether you are ready to smell the money — or still busy laughing at the smoke.