On May Day, Labour Day, of all days Tosin Eniolorunda, Co-Founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint, took to the stage and later, LinkedIn to deliver what read like a corporate TED talk on Nigeria's talent crisis. The post has since gone viral in tech circles, generating a wave of approving nods from people who perhaps did not read it closely enough.

The part that is true

Tosin Eniolorunda is partly right about the talent gap, but he's asking the wrong people to fix it, and conveniently ignoring his own role in the problem.

To be fair, Eniolorunda is not making things up wholesale. Nigeria does face a serious brain drain. The Japa wave is real. Senior engineers with payments infrastructure experience are genuinely scarce. Dangote has indeed complained publicly about talent shortages. These are legitimate structural problems.

There is also an ongoing rot steming from the consumption of content online, ala tiktok, instagram, twitter.

I also agree that there is the hookup culture, yahoo yahoo etc and the educational system is in decline.

There is also a role model problem, especially when you see politicians making blood money off the suffering of the masses.

But acknowledging a real problem is not the same as diagnosing it honestly and his diagnosis is riddled with contradictions, omissions, and a rather convenient scapegoating of structural forces that companies like his have helped create.

"Nigeria Doesn't Lack Talent — It Lacks Honest Employers"

Every few months, a familiar narrative resurfaces in Nigeria's tech ecosystem: "We don't have enough senior technical talent."

This time, it came from Tosin Eniolorunda, who argued that Nigeria lacks the senior engineers, data scientists, and growth leaders needed to build globally competitive companies and that those we do have are leaving.

It sounds reasonable. It even sounds factual. But it's not the full truth, and in many ways, it's dangerously misleading.

The "Talent Shortage" Myth

Nigeria does not have a talent shortage. Oh please!! in a nation of 200+ million people. with some of the fasting growing technology focused startup ecosystems?

Go to any university, private, federal or even a polytechnic and check their faculty of engineering and sciences and you will find some of the most cracked talent at that level on God's green earth. So rest for God sake!!

A more relevant fact is that Nigeria has a talent mispricing problem. This is facts because there are thousands of highly skilled Nigerian engineers:

• Building systems for global companies remotely
• Leading engineering teams across Europe and North America
• Scaling infrastructure far beyond the "80k users/day" that was mentioned.

These people didn't disappear. They simply opted out of the local market. Why? Because the same companies complaining about talent scarcity:

• Undervalue senior talent
• Offer compensation that doesn't match global benchmarks
• Expect world-class output with locally suppressed pay

I am not saying Moniepoint doesn't "pay well" but that in itself is subjective, I don't have the median figures for what techies earn but we know minimum wage is N77k, paying someone 3 million naira gross monthly for a mid to senior role is paying "very well" till you take a closer look at the international thresholds of $80k-$150k and even more annually. Your monthly N3million(which by the way 90% of the nation would take) is under $40k per annum. You can't price talent like it's 2016 and expect 2026 performance.

"Talent Are Leaving" — But Why?

Blaming Japa is very convenient and very very lazy. Consider for a moment the talent with the actual means to japa, versus the overall number in the talent pool and you would just laugh.

Eniolorunda laments that Nigeria is "losing the small we produce to Japa." He mentions the 16,000 doctors who have left. What he does not mention is why they are leaving. People do not emigrate because they are ungrateful or unpatriotic. They leave because of collapsed public infrastructure, currency devaluation, insecurity, and the complete absence of a social contract from the Nigerian state.

Meanwhile, companies like Moniepoint that are well-funded, dollar-denominated at the treasury level have benefited enormously from the same macroeconomic conditions that are pushing talent out. The naira collapse that devastates a mid-level engineer's purchasing power? It makes Moniepoint's dollar-denominated equity and foreign investment significantly more powerful locally. You cannot profit from the conditions causing brain drain and then lecture the country about the consequences of brain drain.

But talent doesn't just leave countries. They leave conditions. Senior engineers are not just chasing money, they are choosing:

• Better engineering culture and community
• Stable infrastructure (power, internet, tools)
• Respect for specialization
• Clear career progression

If your best engineers are leaving, the real question isn't "Why is talent scarce?"

It should be "Why is staying unattractive?" and what have you done to make it attractive?

• Competitive salaries that match the realities of Nigeria?
• Infrastructure like home internet to enable them work from home
• Structured career progression?

The Experience Paradox (That Companies Created)

The CEO points out a real issue:

Not enough feeder industries → not enough senior talent

That is very true. But here's what he won't say. Many Nigerian companies:

• Don't invest in structured mentorship
• Don't build junior-to-senior pipelines
• Want to hire finished products, not develop people

So what is the result of this culture? Everyone fights over the same "ready-made" senior engineers. This isn't a national failure. It's an organizational strategy failure. I am aware of companies that actually invest in capacity building through their graduate trainee programs and other

His claim that Nigeria lacks "feeder industries" starter companies that produce junior talent who then grow into senior leaders is presented as a passive environmental tragedy. But who builds feeder industries? Large, well-funded companies do. By investing in graduate programmes, paying for certifications, sponsoring bootcamps, creating structured career ladders, and crucially paying people enough that they do not need to leave.

If Moniepoint is growing at 20% year-on-year and cannot find enough senior technical talent locally, the honest question is: what has Moniepoint done, systematically and at scale, to build that senior talent internally over the past decade? Pointing at the talent gap without answering that question is like a farmer lamenting the soil while refusing to water it.

When Big Tech companies in the US faced similar pipeline problems, they built internal universities, funded HBCUs, launched apprenticeships, and lobbied for immigration reform. They did not post on LinkedIn about how the soil was bad.

Global Standard? Then Pay Global Price

You cannot say:

"We want to compete with China and India" …and then:

• Pay 3–5x below global market rates
• Limit stock options or wealth creation
• Overwork teams without world-class systems

Countries like India didn't magically produce senior talent.

They:

• Built ecosystems
• Attracted global capital
• Paid competitively
• Exported talent and retained enough locally

If Nigerian companies want global outcomes, they must adopt global talent economics.

Nigeria will be great, but not because of this

He ends with "Nigeria will be great. Let's all do the work together." It is a fine sentiment. But "doing the work together" has to include companies like Moniepoint publishing their graduate intake numbers, their internal promotion rates, their training budgets, their average engineer tenure, and their naira salary bands for senior technical roles so Nigerians can judge for themselves how much of the "work" is actually being done.

Until then, the post reads less like a call to action and more like a CEO managing the optics of a difficult hiring environment by framing a competitive problem as a national crisis and asking the nation to solve it for him

The Real Constraint Isn't Talent, duh!! It's Environment

Let's be honest:

Even the best Nigerian engineer struggles locally with:

• Power instability
• FX volatility
• Limited access to global tools/services
• Policy uncertainty

These constraints reduce productivity before talent even becomes a factor.

So when companies say: "We don't have enough quality talent"

What they should be saying is: "We don't have the environment that allows talent to thrive."

What a more honest post would say

If Eniolorunda wanted to be genuinely honest since he invokes honesty twice he might have written something like this: We at Moniepoint are competing globally. We struggle to find enough senior technical talent locally. We have contributed to this problem by not investing enough in structured talent development pipelines. We plan to change that with specific, funded commitments. Here is what we are doing. Here is what we are asking other companies to do alongside us. Here is what we need the government to do. Let us hold each other accountable in six months.

That would be self-awareness. What he actually posted is a diagnosis without accountability, a lament without commitment, and a call to action that places the entire burden of the talent crisis on Nigeria's structural failures while a 20%-growing company with dollar-denominated investment capital stands to the side, nodding solemnly.

What Should Actually Change

If companies like Moniepoint want to fix this, the playbook is clear:

• Pay competitively (not "locally competitive" globally competitive)
• Build internal talent pipelines aggressively
• Create strong engineering cultures, not just delivery pressure
• Offer real ownership (equity, upside)
• Invest in tools and infrastructure that match global standards

Because talent doesn't scale where it isn't valued.

Final Thought

The statement "Nigeria lacks senior talent" is not entirely false.

But it's incomplete. And incomplete truths are often more dangerous than outright lies. Nigeria doesn't lack talent. It lacks enough systems and sometimes enough honesty to keep it.