Following intense social media backlash over comments made at The Platform Nigeria’s May Day event, Tosin Eniolorunda, co-founder and CEO of Moniepoint Group, has issued a detailed clarification regarding his company’s struggle to fill over 500 job vacancies.
Eniolorunda clarified that the core issue is not a general lack of intelligence or capability among Nigerians, but a critical, systemic shortage of resident senior technical talent capable of building and managing infrastructure at a global scale.
From Backlash to Home Truths
The debate erupted after Eniolorunda’s initial presentation, where he revealed that Moniepoint had restricted its hiring exclusively to Nigeria since 2024 but struggled to fill hundreds of roles due to applicants falling short of international standards.
Critics online quickly pushed back, attributing the vacancy gap to aggressive hiring benchmarks and local compensation structures.
Responding via a statement on his LinkedIn page, the fintech chief executive sought to shift the discourse from emotional reactions to economic realities.
“The stark reality is this, opportunities are few and far between, unemployment/underemployment is high and sadly there are too few employers for a huge market such as ours, at least when compared to other large markets like China and India,” Eniolorunda stated. “But we must tell ourselves the truth. Nigeria currently doesn’t have enough highly skilled technical talent still resident in Nigeria as required to build companies that can scale globally.”
He emphasized that his assessment was specifically targeted at upper-tier technical leadership, adding, “It is important to note that this is not about Nigerians generally, this is about senior Nigerian talents still resident in Nigeria.”
The Trans-Generational ‘Japa’ Drain and Broken Pipelines
Eniolorunda identified the persistent migration of skilled professionals, popularly known as the Japa wave, as a primary driver behind the depletion of Nigeria’s executive ecosystem.
He noted that the issue transcends tech, drawing parallels to the 1980s exodus of medical professionals to the Middle East, and citing recent data showing Nigeria lost approximately 16,000 medical doctors to the US and UK as of March 2024.
Beyond migration, Eniolorunda pointed to a critical structural issue: the absence of a robust “feeder ecosystem” within the Nigerian corporate landscape.
“Nigeria does not have too many feeder industries across the board,” he explained. “As such, there are fewer starter companies that young talent can come from to feed into senior roles in other companies. Every one then ends up fighting for the same pool of senior leaders that have experience and bandwidth to deliver and win in the market.”
He raised sharp rhetorical questions to illustrate the scarcity of elite engineering and operational capacity left in the country:
“How many Nigerian engineering VPs remaining in Nigeria can manage payments infra at scale?”
“How many senior data scientists model millions of customers with prudent NPLs (Non-Performing Loans)?”
“How many growth execs have scaled apps to 80k users/day?”
The Gap in Present-Day Competitiveness
While acknowledging that training young tech professionals is essential for long-term sustainability, Eniolorunda argued that local upskilling initiatives cannot instantly solve the immediate execution demands faced by major enterprise players like Dangote, Flutterwave, LemFi, and Moniepoint, which actively compete against aggressive global counterparts, particularly from China.
“Training young talents can fill the gap for the future but is inadequate for today,” he remarked. “Companies need senior talent and cannot wait the eight to ten years needed to get them to senior levels to compete.”
Despite the talent acquisition bottleneck, Moniepoint remains heavily anchored locally. The CEO revealed that the fintech unicorn employs over 3,500 full-time staff, with over 90% comprising local Nigerian talent, and is currently sustaining a 20% Year-on-Year (YoY) workforce growth.
He expressed an aspiration to push that local footprint to 99% while continuing to build products for a global market.
Concluding his address, Eniolorunda called on stakeholders across the public and private sectors to confront the human capital deficit head-on rather than indulging in institutional denial.
“Self-deception isn’t a virtue and we must tell ourselves the home truth, we need to raise the quantity and quality of our technical talents resident in Nigeria to compete. No organization can rise above the quality of its output, and execution is everything in this game. Nigeria will be great. Let’s all do the work together,” he concluded.
