There is a particular kind of hurt that comes from being told you are not enough, not by a stranger, not by a foreign company looking down at Africa from a distance, but by one of your own.
That is what happened recently when Tosin Eniolorunda, CEO of Moniepoint, stood at The Platform Nigeria and told the room something that has since set the internet on fire.
His company, he said, has 500 vacancies and is struggling to find people to fill those roles, not only in quantity, but in quality. The few candidates they found were not meeting the global standards they needed.
He went further and pointed at the education system, social values, the growing influence of internet fraud and get-rich-quick culture among young Nigerians.
Viola, social media, predictably, exploded!
But before we reach for the anger, let us sit with the full picture.
The part that stings
Moniepoint is not a foreign company dismissing Africa from a boardroom in London. It is a homegrown fintech unicorn, built and funded by Nigerians, for Nigeria. And when its CEO says he cannot find enough qualified Nigerians to fill 500 roles, it does not just read as a recruitment complaint; it reads like a verdict on a generation, and Nigerians felt it exactly that way.
Here’s a question nobody at that podium has asked: What exactly are these 500 roles offering? And is the compensation package competitive enough to retain talent that has options, including the option to leave Nigeria entirely?
The amnesia that is convenient
Moniepoint employs over 3,500 full-time staff, and over 90 per cent of them are Nigerian. So Nigerians built this company. Nigerians are running this company right now. The very infrastructure that made Moniepoint a unicorn was laid by Nigerian hands.
Eniolorunda himself was built by a system that believed in him. He worked at Interswitch before founding TeamApt, and now Moniepoint. Interswitch gave him a ladder and the uncomfortable question is; why is Moniepoint not building that same ladder for the generation coming behind?
You cannot benefit from a system that invested in you and then refuse to invest in the ones following.
The government cannot escape this
The Moniepoint CEO made some valid points. And if we are serious about this conversation, we have to say that clearly too.
Nigeria’s public education system has been in managed decline for decades. University strikes, underfunded polytechnics, a curriculum that has not meaningfully evolved with the demands of a digital economy; these are government failures with real consequences. The young Nigerian entering the job market today was educated in a system the government never fully fixed.
Inflation has made the cost of professional development courses, certifications, conferences prohibitive for the average young Nigerian.
When the environment is broken, it produces people who are brilliant at surviving but who have had fewer opportunities to develop the technical depth that global companies demand.
The Japa factor nobody wants to name honestly
And then there is Japa, the mass exodus of Nigeria’s most skilled and ambitious people to countries that offer stability, better pay, and a functioning system.
The Japa wave did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because Nigerians bright, hardworking, ambitious Nigerians looked at what this country was offering and made a rational decision. They left.
What all of us need to do
The government must fix the foundational things in education, infrastructure, power, security, and economic conditions that make staying in Nigeria a viable choice for talented people.
The honest answer is that the talent crisis in Nigeria is a shared failure and shared failures require shared accountability.
Companies especially homegrown unicorns that benefited from Nigerian talent and Nigerian consumers must invest in building, not just recruiting. Create junior pathways. Fund training. Partner with universities. Build the ladder. Stop expecting a broken system to produce finished professionals and then expressing shock when it does not.
And to young Nigerians navigating all of this, the frustration you feel is valid. Being told you are not enough by a system that never gave you enough is a particular kind of injustice. But the answer, painful as it is, is to keep building your skills wherever you can because the Nigeria that needs you is not the Nigeria of today.
The talent is here. It has always been here. The real question is whether the people with the power and the platforms will stop pointing fingers long enough to actually build something worth staying for.
