Co-founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of Moniepoint Inc, Tosin Eniolorunda, has warned that Nigeria does not currently have enough senior technical talent resident in the country to build globally competitive companies at scale.
Eniolorunda made the remarks while responding to public discussion that followed his conversation at The Platform Nigeria on May Day.
He said Nigeria faces a serious talent challenge at a time when opportunities remain limited, unemployment and underemployment are high, and the number of employers is insufficient for a large market.
According to him, the issue is not about Nigerians generally, but about the limited number of highly skilled senior technical professionals still living and working in Nigeria.
“We Nigerians are some of the most hardworking and gritty people in the world, but we are not producing enough technical ones and losing the small we produce to Japa,” he said.
Eniolorunda noted that companies seeking to maintain market leadership must confront the shortage of senior talent capable of driving execution at global standards.
He cited specialised roles such as engineering leaders who can manage payment infrastructure at scale, senior data scientists capable of modelling millions of customers while managing non-performing loan risks, and growth executives who have scaled digital platforms to tens of thousands of users daily.
He said such senior technical professionals are rare in Nigeria and are leaving the country at a fast rate.
The Moniepoint chief executive linked the problem partly to the lack of broad feeder industries that can train young professionals and prepare them for senior roles. He said the limited number of such companies means many organisations are competing for the same small pool of experienced leaders.
He also said the Japa wave has worsened a long-standing national problem, recalling that Nigeria had faced similar losses in the medical sector since the early 1980s, when many health professionals left for countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
According to him, by March 2024, Nigeria had lost about 16,000 medical doctors to other countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom.
Eniolorunda also raised concern over the quality of education in the country, saying Nigeria’s education standard is falling behind global counterparts.
He said while training young talent remains important, it cannot immediately solve the current demand for senior technical capacity because companies cannot wait eight to ten years for young professionals to mature into senior roles.
He said companies such as Moniepoint, Dangote, Flutterwave and LemFi are competing in global markets and need strong technical capacity to match competitors from countries such as China.
Eniolorunda said Moniepoint currently has more than 3,500 full-time employees, with over 90 per cent of them Nigerians, adding that the company is growing by 20 per cent year-on-year.
He said the company would prefer a situation where Nigerian talent accounts for as much as 99 per cent of its workforce while it continues to build for the global market.
He urged Nigeria to confront the challenge honestly and invest in improving the quantity and quality of technical talent resident in the country.
“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,” he said.
He added that no organisation can rise above the quality of its output, stressing that execution remains critical in building globally competitive businesses.
“Nigeria will be great. Let’s all do the work together,” he said.
