Abstract
Mainstream entrepreneurship literature highlights mainly the positive aspects of entrepreneurship, which sometimes may be misleading as there are arguably positives and negatives with everything in life. This presents false hope for those interested in choosing entrepreneurship as a career, as the full picture is hardly narrated. To this end and to reduce information asymmetry, this study hopes to demystify and unravel the dark side of entrepreneurship, which speaks directly to the varying negative actions that result from doing entrepreneurship. To this end, we applied the narrative inquiry technique to analyse the transcripts of 30 semi-structured interviews of male and female entrepreneurs in Nigeria to document their entrepreneurial actions that are considered ‘dark’. The findings indicate that despite the brilliant policy initiatives set out by the Nigerian government, some individuals ‘hijack’ the systems, forcing entrepreneurs to act in unethical ways to become successful entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs also display emotional traits such as social isolation, distrust and stress. This study recommends monitoring and evaluation to follow policy initiatives and serve as a moderating factor for entrepreneurship in Nigeria. This study also highlights gendered differences in entrepreneurial actions, thereby reinforcing that, indeed, entrepreneurship is gendered, and therefore, documenting these gendered findings can be useful in informing policymakers.