Little is said on the benefits of street hawkers. Complaints or stories of their nuisance are more common; skipping the trade’s importance for job creation, and its role in Nigeria’s retail sector.
Recently though, a sales manager at Unilever published an exposé on a street trader earning ₦1,000,000 per month— as much income as a mid-level manager at Total Nigeria. For a moment, people saw street trading differently.
Was it really possible?
Well, Mathew Eigbe, a Network Marketer and Consumer Behaviour expert, thinks so. “It’s possible given the network Chinedu [the street trader] has built. You see, he is earning from his effort and the effort of some 100 others,” he explains. “This is the concept of leverage. John Paul Getty, one of the early billionaires in America put it this way, ‘I would rather have 1% of the efforts of a hundred people than 100% of my own effort’.”
