THE MONIEPOINT CEO LIED AND NIGERIANS ARE LETTING HIM GET AWAY WITH IT

Tosin Eniolorunda said he cannot fill 500 job vacancies because Nigerian graduates lack world-class skills.Then his own DreamDevs programme received 9,000 applications for just 20 slots.Let me translate that for you.9,000 qualified Nigerians raised their hands. He took 20. The remaining 8,980 are now "unemployable."Now — I want to be fair. There IS a real talent problem in Nigeria. Just not the one he described.The truth is that Nigeria is haemorrhaging its best senior engineers. Over 20,000 Nigerian tech professionals left for the UK, US, and Canada in the last two years alone. A 2023 NBS report confirmed that over 70,000 Nigerians received work or study visas between 2021 and 2023, the majority of them skilled professionals. Microsoft and Amazon are literally running dedicated programmes to relocate Nigerian developers abroad. One senior frontend engineer left his well-paying Lagos fintech job not for money but because police officers harassed him at a checkpoint simply for carrying a laptop.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/Screenshot_20260514-074919.jpg"/>So yes. The senior talent gap is real. But who created that gap?You cannot pay ₦150,000 and expect someone who earns $5,000 monthly working remotely for a foreign company to beg you for a desk. You cannot offer entry-level salaries for roles that demand years of experience and then blame the applicant for walking away. MTN Nigeria had to increase top earner salaries by 97% just to stop their own engineers from Japa-ing. That is what competing for talent actually looks like.The DreamDevs contradiction makes this even worse. If 9,000 people applied for 20 slots, the pipeline is clearly not empty. The question that nobody is asking the CEO is: why were the other 8,980 rejected? Was it truly skill? Or was it salary expectations that a Nigerian company simply refused to meet?And let us address the ghost jobs elephant in the room, multiple reports confirm that companies like Moniepoint have maintained job listings online with no genuine intention to hire, using open vacancies to project growth to investors. So which story are we believing today? No qualified candidates, or no real vacancies?The most painful part is that many Nigerians nodded along and agreed with him because we have been so thoroughly conditioned to believe our suffering is always our own fault.Nigeria is not producing unemployable graduates. Nigeria is producing world-class talent that the whole world is actively recruiting, while local CEOs stand at press conferences and blame the product they cannot afford to pay for.So I ask you directly — is this a talent crisis, or a compensation crisis dressed up as a talent crisis? Drop your Comments. 👇

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