How investing in mama put can make you ₦1.8 billion, according to Ubi Franklin

• Ubi Franklin says investing in mama put vendors could generate up to ₦1.8 billion in annual returns.

• His example involves giving 100 vendors ₦50,000 each and collecting ₦50,000 from each vendor daily.

• Franklin says Nigeria's informal food economy remains an overlooked investment opportunity.

Music executive and entrepreneur Ubi Franklin has made a case for investing in street food vendors as one of Nigeria's most underrated wealth-building opportunities, claiming that a structured investment in mama put sellers at motor parks could generate as much as ₦1.8 billion annually.

Franklin made the argument during an appearance on the Built The Hard Way podcast hosted by Cyril Okoi, where he was asked which sectors he would recommend to aspiring entrepreneurs.

He began by warning against the entertainment industry, describing it as one of the most volatile sectors to enter and saying it has a way of turning even good people into villains.

He then pivoted to what he called the unbanked sector, a largely ignored pool of small-scale traders and food vendors operating entirely outside the formal financial system.

"The money in the unbanked is a lot," he said.

Franklin laid out a specific investment model built around mama put sellers operating at motor parks and densely populated areas across the mainland.

His proposal: give 500 mama put vendors ₦50,000 each to fund their daily cooking. At the end of each day, the vendor returns with their earnings, repays the ₦50,000 capital and keeps a share of the profit, while the investor collects a daily return of ₦50,000 per vendor.

He based the model on the observation that a vendor who spends ₦30,000 on ingredients typically generates returns well above 250 percent of that cost, meaning daily earnings of ₦150,000 to ₦200,000 are achievable.

"Do you know how much they make every day? Let's say they use 30k to cook food, those people make more than 250% of that," he said.

Scaling the model to 100 vendors at ₦50,000 daily return each produces ₦5 million per day. Multiply that by 365 days and the figure reaches ₦1.8 billion.

"Calculate 50k daily times 365 days," he said. "Let's say you invested in 100, that's 1.8 billion."

Franklin's argument is not about mama put specifically, it is about the untapped capital sitting in Nigeria's informal economy, where millions of traders operate daily without access to credit, investment or formal financial support.

His pitch is essentially a micro-lending model dressed in everyday language, and the math, however simplified, reflects a real gap that fintech companies like Moniepoint and OPay have already begun exploiting at scale.

For the average person watching from the mainland, his point is simpler, stating that the opportunity is already in front of you.

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