Right of Reply: The Unfiltered Mind of Abimbola Adelakun|By Sunday Dare, PhD

• She wants the skyscraper without a foundation

​There is a particular brand of intellectual vanity that blossoms in the sterile, air-conditioned comfort of diaspora academia. It is a posture of superiority that masquerades as empathy while harbouring a profound, almost visceral disdain for the very people it claims to champion. Abimbola Adelakun, a regular purveyor of this cynicism, has once again treated the Nigerian public to a masterclass in this elitist arrogance.

In her latest broadside, she attempts to dissect the “unexamined life,” yet in doing so, she reveals nothing but the breathtakingly shallow, unfiltered mind of the professional critic, a mind that is as divorced from the grit of the Nigerian reality as it is obsessed with the sound of its own polemics.
​Adelakun’s prose is a performative act of scourging. She writes not to illuminate, but to diminish.

To her, the Nigerian woman frying akara by the roadside is not a person of agency or a symbol of resilience; she is a sordid prop in a narrative of state failure. She looks at the sweat of a mother’s brow and sees only a failure of national imagination. It is a putative approach to discourse: if a solution is not perfect, if it does not immediately transform a developing nation into an industrialised utopia, then it is not merely insufficient, it is a crime.

​What is most scathing about Adelakun’s position is its inherent dishonesty regarding the nature of progress. She mocks the “day of small beginnings,” dismissing the micro-economic activities that have sustained millions as “petty” and “subsistence” farming masquerading as enterprise.

One must ask: what is the alternative? Does she propose that these millions of women, while waiting for the elusive, fully-industrialised Nigerian miracle she demands, simply fold their arms and starve? Her critique of the “ladder” is a prime example of the intellectual trap she sets for herself. She frames the pursuit of micro-capital as an attempt to “trap the poor.” This is the ultimate elitist fallacy.

It assumes that those who start small are doomed to stay small, and that any effort to help them grow is a cynical ploy. It is a rejection of the fundamental history of commerce. Wealth, in every corner of the globe, has always been a ladder. It is built rung by rung. To suggest that a small grant or the act of trading is “unproductive” is to display a profound ignorance of how capital multiplies. It is the language of those who have never had to build anything from nothing, yet feel entitled to judge those who do.

​Adelakun’s piece is rife with the pillaging of history to suit a predetermined outcome. She attempts to invalidate the progress of my generation by claiming it was achieved in a “functioning Nigeria.” This is a convenient revisionism. Every generation has had its monsters; every generation has faced its demons. The difference is that while she chooses to dwell in the darkness of what has been lost, millions of Nigerians are choosing to build in the light of what is possible.

​She attacks my own journey, as if the story of a mother selling goods in Jos is somehow negated because I now serve in government. She demands to know why that mother did not become a multi-billionaire, as if the purpose of every small enterprise is to reach the scale of a global conglomerate, and as if a child rising from humble origins to contribute to their nation’s leadership is not the very definition of success. Her resentment is palpable. She is not interested in the “dignity of the labourer”, a phrase she borrows and strips of its meaning, but in the humiliation of anyone who dares to suggest that the Nigerian spirit is not yet defeated. Adelakun sneers at the informal sector as a sign of poverty, oblivious to the fact that it is the engine room of global resilience.

She demands an industrialised nation, as if one can be decreed into existence by a government mandate while ignoring the necessity of building the grassroots capacity required to sustain it. She wants the skyscraper without the foundation.

​Her obsession with the failures of past empowerment programs is a classic tactic of the naysayer. If a program is mismanaged, the answer is to demand better management, not to argue that the people should not be helped at all. But Adelakun is not interested in better management; she is interested in the total abandonment of the poor to the whims of her theory. She would prefer that the woman at the stall remain destitute, invisible, and unassisted, rather than receive a grant that she considers pittance. It is a cold, stingy ideology that prizes purity of criticism over the reality of survival.

​Let us be clear: the dignity of labour is not a political slogan; it is the bedrock of civilization. It is the quiet resolve of the woman who wakes at dawn to fry akara not because she is trapped, but because she is providing. She is feeding her family, paying for school, and asserting her independence in a world that often wants to ignore her. To look at her and see a sordid failure is to lack the most basic human empathy.

​Adelakun’s unfiltered mind is a mirror of the very cynicism that plagues our political discourse, a belief that we are doomed, that our efforts are futile, and that the only honest action is to stand on the sidelines and jeer. She offers no path, only a critique. She offers no hope, only a blighting of the spirit. The Nigeria we are building is not one of almsgiving, as she so dismissively puts it.

It is a nation that recognises that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single, honourable step. When we provide capital to the small business owner, we are not keeping them small; we are providing the fuel to help them grow. We are betting on the Nigerian. We are betting on the resilience that Adelakun tries so hard to pathologise.

​Adelakun calls for an “industrialised Nigeria,” and on that, we agree. But industrialisation is not an abstraction; it is the sum of millions of small, productive parts. It is the connection between the farmer and the factory, the trader and the supply chain. It is the result of a nation that values work in all its forms.

​The “unexamined life” she warns against is, in truth, her own. She lives in an echo chamber where the only thing that matters is the sharpness of the pen and the volume of the scorn. She is the voice of the status quo that fears the activation of the grassroots, because the empowered grassroots are the ones who will ultimately render the cynical pundit irrelevant.

​We will continue to stand by the mother selling akara. We will continue to champion the day of small beginnings. We will continue to treat the dignity of the labourer as the highest calling of public service. And while Abimbola Adelakun continues to search for ways to turn our hope into despair, we will continue to do the hard, necessary, and dignified work of building a nation. That is the difference between a critic who is lost in her own mind and a leader who is rooted in the reality of the people.

Sunday Dare is the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Media and Public Communication