The soil problem: Why Nigeria’s talent crisis goes deeper than “Unjapa-able” youth

Tosin Eniolorunda’s frank assessment of the skills gap is a necessary provocation, but the full diagnosis demands we examine the system, not just the individual. When the co-founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint, Tosin Eniolorunda, publicly declared that he cannot fill 500 vacancies because Nigerian youths are not employable, the internet did what it does, […]

Tosin Eniolorunda’s frank assessment of the skills gap is a necessary provocation, but the full diagnosis demands we examine the system, not just the individual.

When the co-founder and Group CEO of Moniepoint, Tosin Eniolorunda, publicly declared that he cannot fill 500 vacancies because Nigerian youths are not employable, the internet did what it does, it split into camps. Some rallied around the candour. Others cried foul. Both sides, in their haste, missed the more uncomfortable truth sitting between them.

This is not simply a story about lazy graduates or heartless executives. It is a story about what happens when 45 years of failed education policy, rank institutional corruption, and a fundamentally broken talent ecosystem finally collide with the ambitions of a company trying to operate at global scale.

“You cannot build a billion-dollar Nigerian company on the back of Nigerian resourcefulness, and then turn around and question Nigerian intelligence. That is a contradiction that deserves examination.”

— Ekenomics

A global crisis wearing Nigerian colours

Let us begin with the uncomfortable global context. The employability gap is not a Nigerian invention.

8M+

Unfilled vacancies in the US as of 2025 70s–80s

Age of workers Japan is rehiring to fill skills gaps ~10 yrs

Estimated lag between junior training and senior readiness

Germany, the industrial engine of Europe, is actively importing workers from Africa and Asia because its own population cannot fill the gap. Japan, one of the most disciplined societies on earth, has a skills crisis so severe that companies are hiring people in their seventies and eighties. China, with 1.4 billion people, has millions of unemployed graduates while factories go short of skilled technicians.

This is a structural development problem that every economy faces at different stages of growth. It is not a Nigerian character flaw. And before we use one leader’s frustration to indict an entire generation, honesty demands we say so plainly.

Eniolorunda’s radical candour, and its limits

None of that diminishes Eniolorunda’s point. His assessment of the Nigerian landscape is, as some have rightly called it, a masterclass in radical candour. Moniepoint operates at a scale that exposes the talent gap with brutal clarity. Execution at the level they are pursuing is never a theoretical exercise, it is the direct by-product of high-level technical expertise and a refusal to accept mediocrity as the gold standard.

The senior talent gap is a sobering reality. You cannot build global-standard payments infrastructure, or the data architecture to underpin it, without leaders who have seen and solved problems at scale before. This is what Eniolorunda is pointing at when he identifies the absence of “feeder industries”, the pipeline of mid-to-senior operators who have been tempered in the fire of previous high-growth environments.

 Three structural realities driving gap

• The scalability conundrum. Global-standard infrastructure requires leaders who have navigated growth at scale, and Nigeria has not yet built enough at-scale organisations to mint them in sufficient numbers.
• The ten-year lag. Investing in junior talent is a vital long-term play. It does not solve the immediate need for senior execution; a lesson every fast-scaling company learns the hard way.
• The Japa drain. Nigeria is losing mid-career talent not just to better salaries elsewhere, but to the simple exhaustion of operating in a system that makes excellence unnecessarily expensive.

These are real constraints. Organisations like Moniepoint and the Dangote Group prove that excellence is achievable here, but it requires a relentless commitment to raising the bar, and a willingness to pay the short-term price of building capability rather than simply importing it.

And yet, here is where the conversation typically stalls, because it asks “are Nigerians employable?” without first asking: employable by whose standard? Optimised for whose system? Built for whose economy?

The skills demanded by Nigerian tech companies are almost entirely modelled on Silicon Valley and Western corporate frameworks. The CV format, the interview structure, the performance metrics, they map to a template that was never designed for the environments most Nigerian workers were formed in.

Consider what the same young Nigerian labelled “unemployable” is actually doing every day. Running a logistics operation on WhatsApp with zero formal training. Managing a rotating savings scheme for 200 people with zero defaults and zero software. Pricing goods across three different markets simultaneously, in his head, while negotiating in two or three languages before nine o’clock in the morning. Repairing a generator, a phone, and a tricycle engine with tools that should not work, and making them work.

These are extraordinary economic capabilities. They are simply not packaged in a format that fits a Western corporate template. The question is not whether the raw intelligence exists. Anyone who has spent real time in this market knows it does, in abundance. The question is whether we are building an economy, and companies, that recognise, formalise, and develop the intelligence already present.

When Japan faced a skills crisis after the Second World War, Toyota did not go on television and complain that Japanese workers were unemployable. They built the Toyota Production System, a training philosophy so powerful it became a global management standard. They took raw, unskilled workers and built world-class competence from the inside.

The most sophisticated companies in the world do not only hire competence. They build it. If you are running a technology company in a developing economy and your only talent strategy is to find fully-formed, globally-experienced operators, that is not just a talent problem. That is a leadership gap.

This is not a rebuke of Moniepoint specifically. It is a question worth putting to every ambitious Nigerian organisation: what is your internal training infrastructure? What is your commitment to closing the gap between raw potential and global-scale execution, rather than simply lamenting that the gap exists?

The employability gap in Nigeria is not a motivation problem. It is a structural one. A broken education system that, has for decades, produced graduates without practical skills. An economy, that did not build enough industries to train people through real work experience. Employers, who expect world-class output without committing to world-class development. And a public conversation that keeps blaming the individual instead of interrogating the system that produced them.

In economics, when the output is consistently disappointing, you do not keep blaming the output. You examine the process that created it.

And examining that process demands an uncomfortable question of the corporate sector: where is your investment? In developed economies, corporations, nonprofits, and small businesses alike have long understood that talent is not simply hired, it is built. Internship programmes that bridge the gap between academic theory and workplace reality are not charity; they are infrastructure. Yet in Nigeria, too many corporations remain spectators to a crisis they help perpetuate. Are they willing to invest in undergraduates before those undergraduates become the polished products they claim the market no longer produces? Are they willing to engage tertiary institutions — to sit across the table from vice-chancellors and curriculum designers and say, this is what industry actually needs? Are they willing to challenge the policies that have allowed the education system to calcify for decades? Or is it simply more convenient to keep pointing the finger at the graduate standing in front of them, the one shaped entirely by a soil that corporate Nigeria helped neglect? Accountability, if it means anything, must be a mirror, not a magnifying glass.

Nigeria’s greatness is not a given. It is a work in progress. And progress begins with telling the full home truth, not just the half that is comfortable for executives to say in public. The problem is not the Nigerian youth. The problem is the soil they were given to grow in, and the systems, governmental, institutional, and corporate, that have tended that soil with remarkable neglect.

Until we are honest about that, we will keep having this conversation. Every year. Louder and louder. With less and less progress.

 

Salami can be reached through [email protected]