The real issue may not be skills scarcity, but the economics of labour in Nigeria’s private sector
Comments made by Moniepoint chief executive Tosin Eniolorunda at The Platform Lagos this month have triggered a familiar debate within Nigeria’s technology and business circles. Eniolorunda said the fintech company currently has more than 500 open positions it is struggling to fill, arguing that the country’s talent pool no longer meets global standards. He pointed to weaknesses in education, the influence of social media, internet fraud and what he described as “hook-up culture”, while framing Moniepoint’s competitive benchmark around China.
The remarks have since generated extensive commentary across LinkedIn and Nigeria’s broader technology ecosystem. But beneath the reaction sits a more consequential economic question: is Nigeria facing a genuine talent shortage, or is the market confronting the long-term consequences of systematically underpricing skilled labour?
That distinction matters because it reframes the conversation from culture to economics.
Nigerian corporates have built highly profitable businesses on structurally inexpensive labour
The most revealing part of the debate is not the criticism of Nigerian workers. It is the underlying arithmetic of Nigerian corporate profitability.
Public filings from listed banks suggest that several of Nigeria’s most profitable institutions allocate materially smaller proportions of revenue and profit to employee compensation than global peers operating at comparable scale. Zenith Bank, GTCO and other leading institutions continue to report strong earnings growth and industry-leading profitability metrics, while personnel costs remain relatively compressed against international benchmarks.
The comparison is imperfect. Accounting standards differ. Business structures vary. Operating conditions are not uniform across markets.
Even so, the gap is difficult to ignore.
Major international banks such as JPMorgan, NatWest and South Africa’s Standard Bank allocate substantially larger shares of revenue and pre-tax profit toward compensation than many Nigerian institutions. The implication is uncomfortable for corporate Nigeria because it suggests that part of the profitability story may derive not from superior operational efficiency, but from a labour market where skilled employees absorb disproportionate economic pressure.
That pressure is amplified by the realities of urban life in Lagos.
Workers are increasingly financing the failure of public infrastructure themselves
For salaried professionals in Lagos, housing, transport, electricity, healthcare, water and security have effectively become private-sector expenses funded from already constrained income.
A modest apartment in commercially viable parts of the city can consume a substantial portion of annual earnings. Power supply frequently depends on diesel generation. Commuting costs remain punitive in both financial and productivity terms. Public infrastructure gaps are routinely bridged through private spending by workers themselves.
In practical terms, many Nigerian professionals operate as miniature self-funded infrastructure systems before productive work even begins.
Against that backdrop, the idea that employers are competing with China while paying Nigeria-indexed wages exposes a deeper contradiction within the country’s labour market. Chinese technology firms compete globally partly because they compensate technical talent at levels aligned with industrial ambition and productivity expectations. Nigeria, by contrast, often expects globally competitive output from workers operating within structurally fragile economic conditions and comparatively weak compensation frameworks.
The consequence is predictable.
“Japa” is functioning as labour-market price discovery
Nigeria’s migration wave is frequently discussed as a cultural or patriotic problem. Increasingly, it resembles a market signal.
Highly skilled workers are relocating because international markets place materially higher value on the same capabilities. Those who remain frequently supplement salaries with secondary income streams, freelance work or entrepreneurial activity because a single income source no longer provides economic stability.
This creates a feedback loop inside Nigerian firms.
Retention weakens, institutional knowledge erodes and training investments decline because employers assume staff mobility is inevitable. Employees, meanwhile, optimise for short-term income extraction because long-term career stability appears uncertain. Productivity fragmentation becomes embedded within organisational culture.
The result is a labour market where companies publicly lament talent scarcity while simultaneously participating in the compensation structures driving attrition.
That tension extends beyond banking into telecommunications and technology.
Outsourced labour and lean payrolls mask the full employment picture
Personnel cost disclosures within Nigeria’s telecoms sector illustrate another layer of the issue. MTN Nigeria’s reported employee expenses appear exceptionally lean relative to revenue, but those figures exclude substantial portions of outsourced and contractual labour supporting the business.
This increasingly fragmented employment structure allows companies to maintain operational flexibility while keeping headline staffing costs relatively contained. Yet it also distances firms from long-term workforce development and institutional continuity.
By contrast, some privately held Nigerian businesses, particularly founder-led firms with multi-decade operating horizons, continue to demonstrate stronger employee retention patterns. In many cases, the difference is not cultural exceptionalism. It is compensation consistency, workforce investment and the treatment of employees as strategic assets rather than quarterly cost centres.
That distinction may become increasingly important as Nigeria competes for globally mobile talent.
The deeper risk is institutional rather than reputational
The significance of the Moniepoint debate ultimately extends beyond one executive’s comments or one company’s hiring pipeline.
Nigeria’s private sector is attempting to build globally relevant institutions within an economy where labour remains persistently undervalued relative to corporate profitability and living costs. That model may maximise near-term margins, but it raises longer-term questions around innovation capacity, workforce stability and institutional durability.
Companies capable of sustaining globally competitive operations typically require deep organisational memory, specialist expertise, stable leadership pipelines and long-term employee commitment. Those conditions are difficult to build in labour markets characterised by chronic attrition and wage compression.
The deeper question, therefore, is not whether Nigerian workers are globally competitive.
It is whether Nigerian companies are building employment structures capable of sustaining globally competitive institutions over time.
That distinction is likely to shape the next phase of Nigeria’s corporate and technology economy more profoundly than any debate about work ethic or generational culture.
Read MIllard‘s full piece below:
I’ve seen some commentary on LinkedIn lately. It’s nothing new. Here’s the context.
At The Platform in Lagos, Tosin Eniolorunda — the chief executive of Moniepoint — gave a speech in which he announced that his company has 500 open positions and cannot find Nigerians qualified to fill them. The Nigerian talent pool, he explained, is no longer up to global standards. He blamed the education system, the influence of social media, the appeal of internet fraud, and what he called “hook-up culture.” He is competing, he said, with China.
I read this on the way back from a parking lot, where I had once again been told — by a friend wagging his finger at me with the confidence of a tenured economist — that I was spoiling the market. The offence was a thousand-naira tip I had just given. About sixty-six American cents. The accusation, in Lagos, is one I am familiar with. I am told it when I pay my driver what someone at a Nigerian bank or telco earns. I am told it when I round up with a vendor. I am told it when I do not, in some unspecified way, behave with the appropriate downward pressure on Nigerian wages. The market, I am informed, must be protected.
The peculiar thing about the people lecturing me is that they only worry about market distortion when it is feeding someone else. They worry about it intensely at the airline counter. I say this because the only sustained inquiry the Nigerian state has ever launched into market distortion that I have seen happened in 2012, when the Senate convened hearings into why a first-class return ticket from Lagos to London cost roughly $10,800, while the same flight from Accra cost less than half that. I’ve never seen such an inquiry to worry about workers payroll. The thinking on that has been settled for a long time. That is the natural order. The funny thing is, as I turn right toward my economy seat, I tend to walk past these same people turning left with the money to pay double for their Business Class after telling me I am distorting the market by paying the few staff I have a wage they can live on.
Mr. Eniolorunda is welcome to tell his workers they are competing with China, and to ignore the country that made him rich and the ecosystem that would one day be great if his industry was able to create globally competitive businesses instead of just nationally mediocre ones – something only possible if you pay your staff a living wage so they stay around long enough to fulfill a corporate vision beyond ‘payments’. If he is reflecting on his comments, I would invite him to consider, briefly, the country in which his staff are apparently so lazy and so distractible.
A passable one-bedroom apartment in desirable parts of Lagos start at N8 million per year and a decent one runs to N15-20 million. Electricity, where it exists, is paid for in diesel by the resident. The commute if you’re not lucky to live in a desirable area, can swallow three hours each way; there is no public transport worth the name. Schools, healthcare, water, security — all are private goods, paid out of the same paycheck. Nigeria taxes the salary; the worker funds the state. To live in Lagos as a salaried professional, in any neighbourhood where one might reasonably plug in a laptop after work, is to spend an obscene amount each year running one’s own miniature city-state. This is what Mr. Eniolorunda’s hires must afford on whatever Moniepoint pays. Should they be so privileged to work for him.
We do not, of course, know what Moniepoint pays. The company is private and the books are not public. What we do have are the books of every listed Nigerian company, which by law disclose what they spend on staff. Banks are the cleanest place to compare, because revenue, headcount, salary lines and pre-tax profit are reported in roughly the same way across markets. Here are six of them, side by side, on the same metric.
Zenith Bank — Nigeria’s largest by some measures — paid out 5 cents on every revenue naira to the people who earn it. GTCO, the first Nigerian bank ever to clear a trillion naira in annual profit, paid out 4. ICICI in India paid 9. JPMorgan, the most profitable bank in American history, paid 29. Standard Bank in South Africa paid 28. NatWest in the UK paid 27. Different accounting standards and business mixes matter, of course, and these are not laboratory-pure comparisons. But the gap is too wide to dismiss as a footnote. In this sample, Nigerian banks pay their staff somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of what their international peers do, measured against revenue earned.
The downstream consequence of the arithmetic is that Nigerian banks are, per employee, more profitable than their international counterparts. They are not more efficient than American banks. They are not better managed. They have simply decided not to pay their staff. Of every dollar of pre-tax profit, Zenith returns 15 cents to the workforce that made it; GTCO returns 7. JPMorgan returns 69. Standard Bank returns 66.
According to GTCO’s own filings, fewer than one in eight of its 5,866 permanent employees earned more than a million naira a month — about $700 — at the close of 2025. The largest single salary band, more than 1,400 people, earned between $275 and $360 a month. These are the people running, by some distance, the most profitable bank in Africa.
Telecoms tell a slightly different story, and one worth pausing on. MTN Nigeria’s payroll line works out to roughly two cents on every revenue dollar — even more extreme than the banks. On closer inspection the comparison is misleading. Bharti Airtel, MTN’s Indian peer, disclosed FY2025 employee benefits of about ₹24 billion against 20,310 on-roll employees and 73,929 contractual workers. In other words, three out of every four people Airtel actually depends on are nowhere in the wage bill. Nigerian telcos run the same model. The published “personnel expenses” line at MTN Nigeria captures only a fraction of the labour the business actually consumes. Two cents is the floor of the iceberg, not the whole of it.
The talent shortage Mr. Eniolorunda has diagnosed is the predictable downstream effect of all this. The brightest leave because they can; what we politely call japa is just price discovery on a national scale. Those who stay are, by month two, moonlighting on three side projects, because the salary will not pay the rent. Those who can afford to be focused on a single job are the ones whose parents have already paid the rent — and they are, by definition, the most ambivalent employees in the building. Training budgets are skeletal because retention is assumed to be impossible, and retention is impossible because training budgets are skeletal. None of this looks like Chinese discipline because Chinese fintech engineers are paid like Chinese fintech engineers. The shortage is not a mystery of the soul. It is a price signal Nigerian employers have decided not to read.
I have witnessed first hand several family-owned firms in Lagos where the back-office staff have been there twenty, thirty years. The drivers, the accountants, the executive assistants. This is not because the founders are saintly. It is because they pay properly, train consistently, and treat the workforce as a long-term asset rather than a quarterly expense. Loyalty compounds. Trust accrues. Institutional knowledge stays in the building, which is, in the end, what an organisation actually runs on. The Nigerian companies loudest about being unable to find people are usually the ones whose people have already left. Looking for hookups, apparently.
Since we cannot see Moniepoint’s books, we do not know how profitable they are or what they pay their staff. But if Moniepoint is telling Nigerian youth that they are lazy, that they like sex too much, and that they need to come to terms with their global mediocrity, the simpler explanation is that the company is offering Nigeria-competitive wages — which are, by any honest international standard, atrocious and will never build up the Nigerian tech industry.
But I would ask Moniepoint to consider whether or not it’s trying to make the most profit, or build Nigeria into a better country. Because from my view, and what I know of the salaries in this market and it’s comparative profitability, 500 vacancies points to a leadership problem, not a staffing one.
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ADDENDUM, MAY 8th:
There has been some discussion with a few of the readers about how higher operation costs factor into Nigerian companies, and they do, at least for banks. But not sufficient enough to explain the full wage gap. Here’s what the look like:
Sources. Tosin Eniolorunda’s remarks at The Platform Lagos, 1 May 2026 (Punch, Premium Times, TheCable). 2012 Senate hearings on Lagos–London airfare disparity (Premium Times, P.M. News). Bank panel: GTCO, Zenith Bank, ICICI Bank, NatWest Group, JPMorgan Chase, Standard Bank Group — most recent full-year audited results available May 2026. MTN Nigeria 2024 audited financial statements; salary structure analysis via TechCabal. Bharti Airtel FY2025 integrated report. Lagos rental data: Nigeria Property Centre, PropertyPro Nigeria. Currency conversions at year-end 2024 NGN/USD ≈ 1,375.
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The Meridian covers markets, labour, capital and the structural forces shaping Africa’s commercial future.
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