Source: 88lately
Tosin Eniolorunda was not trying to start a fight. But he did.
The co-founder and CEO of Moniepoint went on record recently saying his company has over 500 open roles it cannot fill with local talent. His explanation touched on gaps in the education system, the pull of social media, and what he described as a growing preference among young Nigerians for fast money over the slower, less glamorous path of professional development. He also referenced internet fraud culture – Yahoo Yahoo – as a behavioural pattern he has observed increasingly among job seekers. The remarks, as reported by Pulse Nigeria, spread fast.
For a man running one of Africa’s most recognised fintechs, these were not throwaway comments. They were a verdict. And Nigeria’s online community made sure he knew exactly how they felt about it.
The Pushback Was Immediate
Critics did not waste time. The dominant argument across social media was that Moniepoint’s vacancy problem has less to do with skill and more to do with what they are willing to pay for it. One response that spread widely read: “He should just say he can’t find people who will take a mountain of work for shitty salaries.” Another asked pointedly how much the company’s contract staff actually earn, arguing that no level of qualification justifies accepting poor compensation dressed up as opportunity.
Others took a wider view, comparing Moniepoint’s position to a familiar pattern in Nigeria’s private sector – companies that benchmark their output expectations against global standards while keeping their salary structures firmly local. And the numbers do not help Eniolorunda’s case. According to Techawk, a mid-level software engineer at a Nigerian startup earns roughly N800,000 per month. The same engineer working remotely for a foreign employer earns an average of $53,658 annually – roughly N85 million per year at current rates. That gap is not a skills problem. That is a market problem.
The frustration behind these reactions is real and has been building for a long time. Nigeria’s youth unemployment figures remain troubling, and graduate underemployment – where people with degrees end up in roles well below their qualification level, if they find work at all – is even harder to track but widely felt. When a high-profile CEO appears to attribute that reality to character flaws in young people rather than structural failures in hiring, recruitment, and compensation, the reaction is not going to be polite.
But Eniolorunda Is Not Entirely Wrong
Here is where it gets complicated.
Moniepoint is not a local corner operation. The company processes over 800 million transactions worth $17 billion every month, serves over ten million businesses and individuals, and has built a payments infrastructure that rivals anything on the continent. When Eniolorunda says his business competes in a global fintech environment and needs people who can operate at that level, he is not making an unreasonable point.
Nigeria’s education system has well-documented challenges – universities dealing with funding gaps, irregular academic calendars, and curricula that have not kept pace with what the technology industry actually requires. That produces graduates who may be smart, motivated, and hardworking but arrive without the specific technical depth a role demands. That gap is real, and closing it is not something any single employer can fix overnight.
The “get-rich-quick” concern also has some truth underneath the frustration. Social media has genuinely shifted what success looks like for a lot of young Nigerians. When influencer income, crypto wins, and content creation are held up as the aspirational path, the three-year grind of becoming a solid backend engineer or compliance analyst becomes a harder sell. That is a cultural shift, not a character defect, but it does affect the hiring landscape.
What Moniepoint Is Already Doing
To Eniolorunda’s credit, Moniepoint is not just complaining. The company runs DreamDevs, a nine-week engineering bootcamp that recently selected 20 participants from over 9,000 applicants, designed to fast-track engineering graduates into professional roles. It also runs HatchDev in partnership with NITHub Unilag, targeting 500 specialised developers annually. These are serious, long-term investments in talent development – and they tell a different story from the one his comments suggested.
But there is a tension that is hard to ignore. Sponsoring bootcamps while paying naira salaries into a market where the same graduates can earn multiples more working remotely is a difficult position to hold. The pipeline is being built with one hand while the other struggles to retain what comes through it.
The Real Conversation
What Eniolorunda’s comments have done, intentionally or not, is pull a much bigger debate into the open.
Nigeria is sitting on one of the youngest, most connected populations on the continent. The talent is here. What is less consistent is the infrastructure around it – the training pipelines, the apprenticeship culture, the willingness among employers to hire for potential and develop from within rather than wait for a fully-formed candidate to walk through the door. The companies that get this right pay competitively, offer real growth paths, and treat retention as a strategy rather than an afterthought.
Eniolorunda bootstrapped this company from nothing in 2015, building TeamApt before it became what Moniepoint is today. He has navigated this environment longer than most. His alarm is probably genuine. But linking unfilled roles to fraud culture and short attention spans was always going to land badly with a generation that already feels it carries the weight of every systemic failure without enough credit for how much it still shows up.
Five hundred vacancies are open. Nigeria has the talent. The gap lives somewhere between what employers offer and what the market now demands. That conversation is overdue, and now, at least, it is happening.
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