On May 1 at the Platform, organized by the Covenant Christian Centre, Tosin Eniolorunda, CEO of Moniepoint Inc, one of Africa’s fastest-growing fintech companies, made a statement that should stop every Nigerian policymaker, educator, and employer in their tracks. Moniepoint, he said, currently has 500 vacancies on its platform that it has been unable to fill with qualified Nigerians. Five hundred positions. In a country of over 220 million people, with one of the continent’s largest concentrations of university graduates, a leading homegrown company cannot find enough people to hire.
What makes this even more ironic is that tech has now globalized the world, and thus made what used to be education and information that global north economies use to build their world-class systems accessible to everyone willing to do due diligence to find it. Yet it seems Nigerians have taken the wrong view of what is possible, preferring to use our access to the globe for fraud and hookup, and get-rich-quick schemes, instead of looking for how to build sustainable businesses that will help grow the country
The Diagnosis: Where Did the Standards Go?
Nigeria’s employability crisis is not sudden it is the compound interest of decades of neglect. At its root is an education system that has been chronically underfunded, politically manipulated, and structurally misaligned with the economy it is meant to serve. According to UNESCO, Nigeria’s public spending on education as a percentage of GDP has consistently ranked among the lowest globally. Classrooms are overcrowded. Lecturers go on strike for months, sometimes years. And when students finally graduate, they enter a world that has moved far beyond the syllabus they were taught.
But to lay the blame solely at the feet of government would be a convenient escape. Nigerian employers including large corporations have historically preferred to import expatriate talent rather than invest in developing local capacity. The apprenticeship culture that once transferred skills from master craftsmen to the next generation has largely collapsed in formal sectors. And a culture of credentialism, where a certificate is valued over demonstrated competence, has rewarded paper qualifications at the expense of actual skill.
Then there is the soft skills deficit, which is quietly becoming the loudest problem in Nigerian hiring. Critical thinking, written communication, adaptability, professional conduct, and teamwork qualities that global employers treat as baseline expectations are too often absent from applicants. This is not a character indictment of Nigerian youth. It is an indictment of systems that never taught, modelled, or rewarded those behaviours.
The Compounding Issue: The Brain Drain Trap
The Japa wave Nigeria’s mass emigration of skilled professionals to Canada, the UK, and beyond has not merely created a labour gap. It has revealed one. The Nigerians succeeding abroad are proof that raw talent exists. What they found in those new countries were systems that sharpened their abilities, rewarded merit, and gave them environments to perform in. The ones who remained behind are often in the same underdeveloped systems that produced them, with no pipeline to upgrade their skills and no consistent feedback loop from employers about what is missing.
Moniepoint’s 500 vacancies tell us something else: the companies willing to build Nigeria are here, ready to hire, and willing to pay. The pipeline is the problem, not the ambition.
The Prescriptions: Building Global-Stand Nigerians
The solutions are neither secret nor unaffordable — they require will, coordination, and the courage to break comfortable institutional habits.
Curricula must be rebuilt around outcomes, not inputs. Universities and polytechnics must work directly with industry to define what competencies graduates need on day one. Countries like Singapore and Germany have institutionalised this partnership — Nigerian institutions must stop treating it as optional. Courses in data literacy, financial technology, project management, and critical communication should not be electives; in a digital economy, they are survival skills.
Employers must lead workforce development, not wait for it. If Moniepoint and companies of its calibre pooled resources to create structured internship pipelines, pre-employment bootcamps, and apprenticeship schemes, they would not only solve their own hiring problems — they would reset the standard for what Nigerian talent looks like. The private sector cannot outsource this responsibility to a government moving at the pace of a decade.
Soft skills must be taught as explicitly as technical ones. Programmes like the NYSC could be reimagined as genuine professional development platforms — teaching communication, workplace ethics, financial literacy, and leadership — rather than the administrative exercise they have largely become.
The diaspora must be a resource, not just a remittance.
Nigerians thriving in global institutions carry knowledge that is extraordinarily valuable back home. Structured reverse mentorship programs, remote training initiatives, and incentives for diaspora professionals to contribute time and skills to Nigerian upskilling efforts could create a virtuous cycle: the world trains Nigerians, Nigerians train Nigeria.
An Additional Dimension
There is another interesting dimension to this argument, and it is that perhaps we are being overly hysterical about this issue. This piece is not arguing that Nigeria doesn’t have an employability problem, and it is certainly not endorsing “yahoo” or “hookup”; it is just pointing out that young people chasing highs, and glitz and not wanting to do boring stuff, even if it is beneficial in the long term, is not a problem that is peculiar to Nigerians alone. A population that is 60% people aged 25 or below will behave in a certain way, and to think otherwise is delusional. We should be careful when analyzing issues, to not fall into the “overperformance trap” where we believe that by 25, you should be married with 3 kids, have built 2 unicorn startups, have your own fully paid house, and be able to vacation in any country of the world you choose. This is ironically why a lot of the youth get enticed by Yahoo and hookup. In summary, yes, infrastructure and education are good, and good role models are welcome but we can’t educate, model, or infrastructure our way out of a problem that will be solved with boring, old, time.
This brings us back to the importance of Eniolorunda’s speech at the Platform event. Ironically, he himself did admit that part of the reason he was delighted to be at the event this year is that Pastor Poju Oyemade’s (the senior Pastor at NCC and the convener of the event) teachings helped him gain clarity at the time he needed direction for his life before founding Moniepoint, and he even continues to apply those teachings to running the company. It is an indirect admission that sometimes, maybe what is needed much more than shiny new schools, and more tech courses and employability seminars, is good old mentorship.
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