Development Has an Address — The Factory in the Village
The Desk — Finance, Policy & the View from the Street By Kemi Adeosun
Two conversations that explain why development keeps failing to arrive. First of two parts.
I have spent the last few months on the Nidacity podcast, travelling up and down the country, sitting across from the people who actually build things here. It has been the best economic education of my professional life — and I say that as someone who has run a state treasury and a federal one.
What I have learned is too large for one sitting, so I am doing something I rarely do: writing in two parts. This week, the evidence — two conversations that dismantled things I thought I knew about how development actually arrives. Next week, the argument — what that evidence demands of policy, which tier of government should deliver it, and the nations that have already proved the model works.
Let me start with the question that follows me from conversation to conversation: why do so many well-intentioned government initiatives fail to deliver? I can already hear the answers being shouted at the page. Corruption. Cluelessness. The easy words that are thrown around, making us feel simultaneously helpless and vindicated. Whilst not always wrong, they are rarely the whole explanation, and they have a convenient property: they require nothing of us analytically. Blame the character of officials and you never have to examine the architecture they operate within.
What the podcast has taught me — at close quarters, from people with no interest in flattering any government — is that the architecture is part of the problem. The old injunction to think global, act local was no slogan. It was a design principle. And Nigeria has spent sixty years violating it, designing nationally and delivering nowhere.
Two of my recent guests made the case better than any policy paper I have read.
The Woman Who Moved the Factory
This week’s episode features Yemisi Iranloye, the founder of Psaltry International. Her founding insight was so blindingly obvious that it took genuine originality to act on it: she located her cassava processing factory, producing food-grade starch, glucose and sorbitol, in a village encircled by farmland ideal for cassava.
Understand what she was reversing. Cassava is an impatient crop. It begins to deteriorate within days of leaving the ground, which meant generations of smallholders hauling their harvest over broken roads to distant buyers, watching the value rot in transit, and absorbing the rejection at the other end. The farmers were never the problem. The distance was. So she collapsed it. She took the factory to the farm gate.
The results read like a development agency’s fantasy, except they are real and privately built. She is now the darling of development economists. Some 35,000 farmers, the majority of them women, now grow with a guaranteed local offtaker. Mothers who once sold at the mercy of itinerant traders are sending children to university. Solar power lights entire villages around the plant. Piles of cassava line the streets — not as waste, but as inventory for a buyer whose gates are twenty minutes away. Nestlé, Unilever and Nigerian Breweries buy what those villages produce. That is economic growth at the micro level: measurable, compounding, and owned by the people it touches.
No ministry designed this. No national programme funded it into existence. A businesswoman with local knowledge understood something that every federal intervention I ever supervised struggled with: proximity is not a sentiment. It is a production input. I sat in her factory three and a half hours from home, surrounded by rural Nigeria, blown away, and made a rare emotional declaration: “Nigeria can make it.”
The King of Small Chops
Then yesterday, I interviewed Saheeto, the King of Small Chops (to be broadcast soon). He dismantled another of my assumptions. From Lagos Island, he has created thousands of part-time job opportunities — flexible, entry-level, paid work of exactly the kind I argued for in my May Day piece on the minimum wage. The formal labour market, designed in Abuja around a monthly wage floor and a full-time template, has no category for what he has built, given thousands their first earnings and the discipline of work. Yet what he has built is precisely what a city of underemployed young people needs: a first rung.
He did not achieve this by reading a national employment strategy. He achieved it by knowing Lagos Island — its rhythms, its events calendar, its supply chains, its people — at a resolution no federal database will ever capture.
Proximity is not a sentiment. It is a production input. And it is the one input the federal government structurally cannot supply.
Where This Is Going
Sit with what these two stories have in common. Neither needed Abuja. Both needed something Abuja structurally cannot manufacture: knowledge of the ground at the resolution of a single village, a single island, a single value chain. One woman moved a factory to a village and changed 35,000 lives. One man understood a city island well enough to give thousands their first earnings.
If those are not exceptions but demonstrations — if proximity really is a production input — then the policy conclusion is uncomfortable for everyone who has ever designed a national programme, myself included. It means the centre must learn to do less, and the tier of government we trust least must be equipped to do more.
That is next week’s argument: the case for putting Abuja on a financial dry fast, the nations — from China to Indonesia to Kerala — that took the bottom-up road and prospered, and an honest answer to the objection I know you are already forming about Nigeria’s local governments.
The evidence came from the street. The argument follows it there.
Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.
