When Tosin Eniolorunda, co-founder of Moniepoint, said at The Platform Nigeria in Lagos that the company struggled to find Nigerian candidates who met its required “global standards,” the remark triggered a wider conversation about talent, opportunity, and responsibility within Nigeria’s tech ecosystem.
“In 2024, we made a decision that we will no longer hire from any other place except Nigeria. And we chopped the cane in 2025,” Eniolorunda said. “Not only could we not find people in the quantity and the quality we needed, but the people we found also were not up to the global standards of quality that we needed.”
The statement sparked criticism, but it also raised legitimate questions about how Nigerian companies define competence, readiness, and competitiveness in a global technology industry.
What exactly are “global standards”? In practice, the term often refers to benchmarks shaped by major international technology hubs such as Silicon Valley and parts of Europe. These standards are influenced by access to advanced training systems, mentorship networks, research ecosystems, and structured technical development pipelines that many Nigerian professionals simply do not have equal access to.
That context matters.
Moniepoint became a unicorn in 2024 after securing a valuation above $1 billion. The company processes billions of dollars in monthly transactions and employs thousands of workers, the vast majority of them Nigerians. Yet despite that success, it reportedly struggled to fill hundreds of technical positions locally.
The immediate reaction from many Nigerians was defensive. But dismissing the concern entirely would avoid an uncomfortable reality the industry must confront: skill gaps do exist.
Many Nigerian universities still graduate computer science students with limited exposure to practical software development environments. Some coding academies and bootcamps produce graduates without sufficient grounding in collaborative engineering practices, testing frameworks, system design, or production-level deployment processes increasingly required by modern technology companies.
These are not failures of intelligence or potential. They are largely failures of infrastructure, investment, and institutional coordination.
At the same time, companies operating at scale also face real pressures. Fast-growing firms often need experienced engineers immediately, not years later. Hiring globally can therefore appear more efficient than building talent pipelines from scratch.
But this is also where the conversation becomes more complicated.
Companies benefiting from Nigeria’s large consumer market and growing digital economy cannot permanently outsource the responsibility of ecosystem development. Announcing a preference for local hiring without corresponding investment in mentorship, graduate training, technical partnerships, or long-term workforce development risks becoming symbolic rather than transformational.
Several companies have shown that sustained investment can produce results. Andela partnered with global technology organisations to train thousands of African technologists, while Flutterwave launched structured graduate trainee programmes that converted many participants into full-time staff.
The conversation must also include another issue often ignored in discussions about Nigerian talent: compensation.
Many Nigerian employers demand “world-class” output while offering salaries, work conditions, and growth opportunities that fall significantly below global industry standards. Talented engineers frequently leave local companies not simply because of pay differences abroad, but because of poor career progression, burnout, unstable work environments, and limited investment in employee development.
In some cases, companies expect senior-level productivity from junior employees while providing neither the mentorship nor compensation required to support that expectation.
This contradiction weakens the ecosystem. Global standards cannot apply only to employees while employers are exempt from comparable standards in compensation, training, workplace culture, and professional development.
The responsibility therefore extends across the ecosystem.
Government institutions must strengthen technical education and modernise curricula. Universities must place greater emphasis on practical and industry-relevant learning. Professional bodies and training institutions must improve standardisation and certification processes.
Private companies, meanwhile, must move beyond short-term hiring concerns and invest more deliberately in developing the talent pool they depend on.
The debate sparked by Eniolorunda’s comments should not become a fight between national pride and external validation. Nigerian tech talent has already demonstrated its competitiveness globally. Nigerian engineers work at some of the world’s leading technology companies, contribute to major open-source projects, and build products used across Africa and beyond.
The more important question is whether Nigeria’s technology ecosystem is prepared to consistently invest in the systems that turn raw talent into globally competitive expertise.
The standards Nigeria meets will ultimately reflect the standards it is willing to build, fund, and sustain.
