Music executive and entrepreneur Ubi Franklin has stirred conversation online after laying out what he described as one of Nigeria’s most underrated paths to serious wealth: investing in “mama put” food vendors who sell meals at motor parks and other densely populated areas across the mainland.

Franklin made the case during an appearance on the Built The Hard Way podcast, hosted by Cyril Okoi, when he was asked which sectors he would recommend to young entrepreneurs looking to build wealth.

He opened with a warning against the entertainment industry, calling it one of the most volatile spaces to build a career in and noting that it has a way of turning even good people into villains. He then turned his attention to what he called Nigeria’s “unbanked” economy, the vast, largely informal network of small-scale traders and food vendors who operate entirely outside the formal banking and investment system.

According to Franklin, anyone living on the mainland or in a busy, populated area could tap into this overlooked pool of economic activity by backing mama put vendors directly.

He suggested an investor could identify around 500 vendors and provide each with ₦50,000 to fund their daily cooking and sales.

To illustrate the scale of the opportunity, Franklin broke the model down using a smaller sample of 100 vendors. In his example, an investor gives each vendor ₦50,000 as working capital.

The vendor cooks and sells food, returning with roughly ₦200,000 in revenue. From that, the investor takes back ₦50,000, the vendor keeps ₦50,000 as personal earnings, and the vendor reinvests the remaining ₦50,000 into the next day’s cooking. Under that structure, the investor collects ₦50,000 daily from each vendor.

Multiplied across 365 days, a single vendor would generate ₦18,250,000 a year. Scaled across 100 vendors, Franklin arrived at a projected ₦1.8 billion in annual returns, a figure he rounded down from the precise ₦1.825 billion.

Franklin’s comments have since triggered debate online, with some praising the model as a fresh way of thinking about Nigeria’s informal economy and others pointing out that his projection blends revenue, capital recovery, and profit rather than isolating actual take-home earnings.

Critics of the numbers note that a vendor receiving ₦50,000 must first sell enough food to recoup that cost before any surplus exists for either party, and that daily returns are unlikely to hold steady across 100 or more separate small businesses given fluctuating food prices, inconsistent customer traffic, and other operational risks.

Even so, the broader point Franklin was making, that small, repeatable amounts of capital spread across thousands of active informal businesses can add up to outsized opportunity, has resonated with many who see it as an underappreciated corner of Nigeria’s economy.

Photo Credit: X