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Albanese can not continue to allow premier's champion issues that may define the next election. Chris Minns has championed both housing and the burden of environmental regulations on infrastructure and housing cost. If successful, he will have support of a greatful generation.

I'm starting from here so that you guys will understand when I say even with all that effort, senior talent is still extremely hard to find in this ecosystem. I don't just mean designers. High quality PMs, executive level mangers, strong technical talent and systems thinkers are hard to find at Scale. This is partially to be blamed on japa but also critically on our education system which needs a massive overhaul. Instead of lashing out at people who point this out, why don't we focus on how to solve it.

People were ALWAYS going to leave. A pipeline focused on learning and knowledge transfer addresses that. My worry is that product companies are complaining so much when most of the learning was supposed to be embedded in the product and the processes around it, making it easier for people to pick up when those before them inevitably leave. There is a deeper foundational organizational design problem here that has not been adequately addressed. I went through this for a decade and was getting burned out with training people for others until @JosephBFuller cracked this for me at a course at HBS. There is ZERO equity in services. You MUST productize EVERYTHING to keep knowledge within the organization. These companies' complaints are a symptom of a wider problem: a lack of products within the general ecosystem. There are many things you shouldn't have people keeping in their heads. There is room to build many things beyond the payment products you are building, and you should invest in them. Google is my go-to on this. Amazon turned its people into products, and they got AWS from it.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your position in this conversation in detail, but I couldn't help but notice your repeated references to talent residing in Nigeria. Why do you think talented individuals who are at a certain level do not want to remain resident in Nigeria? Maybe by answering that question, you could find answers in a shorter time frame than one decade. Nigeria is a difficult place to live and work in. If people have a choice, they would rather leave. I had the choice and left. I still do a lot of work in Nigeria and serve on boards there, but I cannot live there anymore. It is about where people want to live and work, and their quality of life, more than the remuneration. People in Europe are paid considerably less than those in America, yet they remain in Europe rather than migrate to America. This is why people misunderstand the reason for the current mass migration of Nigerian talent. I moved to Ghana instead of Europe and built a team to support Africa from there because it was a place where I could work and live a normal life. We had a diverse team from multiple African countries who would travel briefly to work at client locations, then return home, but the Nigerians typically wanted to avoid Nigeria, as I did, for obvious reasons. The problem is beyond Moniepoint and beyond the talent pipeline. We trained 120,000 tech professionals at Edo Innovates, but they all left because they didn't want to live in Edo State. Nigeria can keep investing in training talent, but they will keep leaving unless the problem of living conditions is addressed. Poor healthcare was what eventually forced me out of Nigeria, and after I left, I found productivity. If we want to grow world-class companies from Nigeria with world-class talent, we should ensure they don't have to endure third-world living conditions. This is the toughest part, and the truth is that many founders building venture-backed companies have their families residing outside Nigeria. I cannot be living in Ghana and complaining that people don't want to live in Nigeria. I decided to create a more flexible company that would let people live where they want. This is going to increasingly become our reality until something drastic changes our trajectory.

I have followed with rapt attention the discourse that followed my conversation at the Platform Nigeria on May Day. The stark reality is this - opportunities are few and far between, unemployment/underemployment is high and sadly there are too few employers for a huge market such as ours, at least when compared to other markets such as China, India that have similar youth bulge. We Nigerians are some of the most hardworking and gritty people in the world. But we must tell ourselves the truth. Nigeria currently doesn’t have enough highly skilled technical talent resident in Nigeria to build companies that can scale globally. Interestingly, I have also read a lot of employers double down and agree with my current diagnosis around our country’s technical talent pipeline gap and confirmed it is true. Former Minister, Kemi Adeosun also referenced Africa’s richest man, Alhaji Aliko Dangote comments around finding the right quality and quantity of talents for his refinery project. Let me ask a hard question - can we say that Nigeria has enough highly skilled technical talent still resident in Nigeria? That's a huge conundrum that any organization that wants to maintain market leadership must solve for. How many engineering executives do we have remaining in Nigeria that lead a payments team that handles payments infrastructure processing tens millions of transactions daily without fail? How many senior data scientists do we have in Nigeria that can create data models to appraise millions of customers while managing prudent NPLs? How many senior growth executives in Nigeria have the experience of growing a digital apps towards acquiring 80k customers a day through digital and offline channels while maintaining prudent CACs? It is important to note that this is not about Nigerians generally, this is about senior Nigerian talents still resident in Nigeria. Nigeria is not producing enough high quality senior technical talent and the little we have are emigrating. I can explain these to be that Nigeria does not have too many feeder industries across the board. As such, there are fewer starter companies that young talent can come from to feed into senior roles in other companies. Every one then ends up fighting for the same pool of senior leaders that have experience and bandwidth to deliver and win in the market. The effect of the Japa wave has been very well chronicled and I must add that this has been a trans-generational challenge. Remember that time in the early 80s where a lot of our medical professionals left for places like Saudi and the UAE? As at March 2024, Nigeria had lost around 16,000 medical doctors to other countries, most especially the US and the UK. The quality of technical education is also falling as our standard of education is lagging behind global counterparts. Can we say we have enough senior technical talent in Nigeria to compete with global competition especially China? But Moniepoint, Dangote, Flutterwave, LemFi are competing with them. Training young talents can fill the gap for the future but is inadequate for today. Companies need senior talent and cannot wait the eight to ten years needed to get them to senior levels to compete. In training young talent, Moniepoint has seen a lot of bright spots through our various interventions that are aimed at deepening the talent pool. So we are indeed doing something about improving talent density for the ecosystem. Through our DreamDevs programme, which is in its second year, we're training talented young engineering graduates with the skills they need to enter the workforce as top talent. We have supported the government's 3MTT agenda as well as a partnership with Unilag’s NITHUB to push the HatchDev initiative. Our Women in Tech internship programme, which now in its sixth year, provides women with the access, training and opportunities they need to build careers in tech. I also personally have a scholarship program for STEM students across select Nigerian universities in every geo-political zone. Competing globally also means that you spend top dollars to retain top Nigerian talents that you have nurtured. We routinely retain Nigerians that emigrate and pay them according to their local market standards. A recent example is an exceptional first class graduate we nurtured through our women in Tech program and had to go to school just as a path to emigrate and we had to retain abroad and offer an alternative naturalization path for her. Moniepoint has over 3,500 full time employees with over 90% Nigerian talents, and we’re growing 20% YoY. We’d love a world where this is at 99% while building for the world. 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. No organization can rise above the quality of its output and execution is everything in this game. Nigeria will be great. Let’s all do the work together. By the way, top tech talents still resident in Nigeria, we need you badly. We pay above market rates and you will make real impact. Please apply here: moniepoint.com/careers For top Nigerian talents out of the country, we hire out of the UK, Portugal, Spain, India and Pakistan. Also apply, we are building digital banking infrastructure that provides financial happiness for emerging markets.

Northern Switzerland to build the worlds largest redox flow battery, with an output that matches a nuclear powerplant. (1.2Gwh) will be charged using excess wind and solar, and discharge at night to power a city. newatlas.com/energy/switzer…

Planning and building productivity is being discussed at the national level by the same clowns who won't pony up the money to assist the state's who need to fund the infrastructure. Fantastic 👏👏

Women have decided to go all in on interracial marriages in recent years. Why did it take y'all so long? The pace of change has been spectacular. Happy for the change, people who have been on the fence are now giving it a go.

Demographic and fertility data is sometimes fascinating. The developed world owes an appreciation to those who have chosen to bear the burden. Teenage mothers and women with 3+ kids are champions, the data will make for a terrible read without them.

We need a new terminology for what African countries understand industrialisation to mean. That word doesn’t quite work because it has no development attached to it. All things equal, you should expect the same outcomes for this refinery as happened with Dangote Cement. For instance, after more than 20yrs, no engineering talent has flowed out of Dangote Cement into the wider economy and I’ve not heard of anyone who developed their engineering talent in the group and then went on to set up their manufacturing or engineering concern elsewhere in the country. The entire management of the company is simply hired from elsewhere. When you read this you’ll notice there’s no crossover between the cement concern and this refinery in terms of engineering talent or knowledge scmp.com/news/china/dip…

I don't understand why there isn't a campaign for an increase to GST, no developed nation can fiscally survive with a 10% GST in a post COVID economic landscape without a political crisis. A downstream of low GST is that states don't have money for housing enabling infrastructure

MYER will be like, we sell this product but only in the CBD, people in your area are too poor to afford it......

@NnamdiJuugo @stanssy It is why i always ask "where is the housing crisis" when i see the political commentary on housing. It seems there is always something else to prioritise.

@stanssy @de_frabz All this talk Come to Tasmania. They de-prioritised everything ahead of building a stadium. Im not even mad anymore

Isn't this beautiful?

@stanssy Invest in your city...... To be honest, I don't think the top is here yet, the availability of credit is still at historic highs regardless of interest rate rises.

@stanssy The affordability of housing is becoming a major headache for the government as the city can't produce enough jobs. Please, if you buy in Victoria, buy closer to the city. The new developments in the fringes have an oversupply of infrastructure ready land already.

@stanssy The development that was meant to happen there was moved a further 20km from the CBD to Gawler.

@stanssy South Australia can do the same but there will be a political blowback on both debt and land rezoning. Three years ago farmers in Waterloo corner and Virginia launched a campaign against Peter when he wanted to rezone the farms. They called it prime agricultural land.

@stanssy My "isn't it beautiful" is sarcasm. It is a generational and social tragedy but wetin man go do.

In an ideal world, top on the tax reform agenda should be a plan to raise GST incrementally to above 15%. State's bear the cost of delivering infrastructure and they need the additional income. Unfortunate that Queensland and WA will not agree, beholden to mining interests.