Proze 👨‍💻

@asemota Currently talking with my classmates in the diaspora about setting up at least a functional dialysis center that we can scale up! Guess what our limiting factor is? Same security. After my kidnap years ago it's even worse. Until security is fixed. . na play Dem dey play.

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.

I am old enough to remember when the world was mobilizing to stop Apartheid in South Africa and famine in Ethiopia and Nigerians were helping with those efforts. Now look at where we are today. From now on, let people solve their problems. There is no pan Africanism. It is dead.

I don't want to even say much about this but a unicorn in Nigeria should know it's destiny. The issue is that many Nigerians talk the American talk and also try to do same. You're in the poverty capital of the world with more than 20 million out of school kids and a very very very very bad education system. You don't do philanthropy like Microsoft, instead you fix your Local problems. We have so much fintech yet we have majority of Nigerians financially illiterate. Universities in Lagos by now should be producing the best engineers, that's how to fix the pipeline. This is my issue with Tunji, instead of doing "AI abracadabra", 6 months "tech folks", just create a stable pipeline for great engineers. Like how are we going to have great engineers without solid mathematicians? You left the guy that has 4 years to study and are trying 3 million in 6 months?! Noise! A waste of everybody's time.

No sir,,we migrated due to lack of clean water and electricity.

We realised this talent issue early at Seamfix. From inception we built our talent pipeline from university IT interns & NYSC corpers. We later formalised this into our @Seamfix_nextgen training academy. And yes, Japa syndrome hasn't helped. But we must keep doing what we must.

Donald Trump came and scattered everyone's economy, and he gets to retire and enjoy his life.

I should update my older thread on this topic. Talent was always going to be the battleground, and I said this a couple of years ago. You have to build a pipeline that adapts to your needs, rather than fighting in the same market as the rest of the world and complaining when people make optimal choices. Doing it this way is costly and brutal. Citibank, Nigerian Breweries, and Shell discovered this talent quality problem as far back as the 90s and decided to build a process to take “average people” and turn them world-class. This process in Nigeria and Africa has focused mainly on coding with Andela and others when coding skills were in high demand globally, but AI changed everything. Demand is still there but it shifted gears. Coding skills are NOT everything a startup needs. In Nigeria, we lack experienced operators in many areas because there aren't many places for them to learn. One of the things people fail to realize about Japa is that it provides learning and advancement opportunities. You need to create learning opportunities for people as an investment. This has always been my problem with the so-called “tech investment” in Africa. People are funding the output of a broken pipeline rather than investing in fixing it. They invested in companies skimming from the top rather than building from the bottom up. Google and others did a lot better from the bottom in Africa. We need company academies again and partnership with educational institutions. I was able to do my undergrad project research because of a lab in UNIBEN partly funded by Shell. This current model we have is unsustainable. I will write more. This is just a rant.

One of the biggest failures of Corporate Nigeria is that they don't invest in Nigerian Skill Development. Pick certain universities, sponsor a chair of your choice, select professors and give guidelines on the kind of graduates you expect, offer scholarships to students. Build labs & curricula; offer internships to the best students, offer placements to the NYSC corpers that they graduate & retain them if they perform, run routine staff training. In less than 10 years, we will have more than enough talent to even outsource. I'm sure this will be less than the budget for CSR and 1% Educational Tax currently levied and the impact on ROI will be impressive

Everytime the DSS/Army/Police picks up based on social media posts, I marvel at the efficiency. Seemingly anon accounts get nabbed under 24hours - anywhere they are, within the country. 48H max. Makes you wonder. Makes you also confirm the truth about Nigeria's insecurity.

If you're a global company & you're unable to find 500 perfect hires from a country of 200M people - you might want to fire your entire HR department.

Just look at these wild aneemas 😭

Ehn ehn? So it is possible? It is possible to turn down ambassadorial appointments? Wonderrfuuul. When your purpose is greater than your greed, you confirm that it's not all tables you should eat from. The ones whose greed > purpose become apolitical.

With gratitude and deep reflection, I made the difficult decision to decline the appointment as Youth Ambassador. This is not out of disrespect - it can be a matter of purpose, timing and conviction.

My respect for you just shot up 900 ceilings. Until we have trust worthy, belly decentered, conscience driven, truth telling, evil deflecting young people like yourself - we won't tear down the defences that enables demonic governments. It is the modus operandi of wicked institutions. When they run a rampage of evil and run out of goodwill, they hunt down folks with seeming public grace for masked whitewashing. Charlatans who want to become billionaires from NGO service will of course fall instant prey.

This is Ifeyinwa Peace Okwudu. The school administrator for Ezzy Nursing College, Enugu. She earlier suspended Joy Ezeugwu indefinitely for speaking against the rot in Uwani General Hospital, Enugu. She then arrested Joy Ezeugwu this morning and demanding N10 million for emotional and psychological damage. A student recently died in her school because of lack of care. 150 more students are in cue to be expelled.

The difference is that extra income from lobbying –what the Americans refer to as “corruption” in Africa.

STABLE ELECTRICITY when PETER OBI becomes president

These are the guys that stormed their presidential palace and beat up their politicians in 2024, right?

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river & he's not the same man Every road travelled, waters waded, I do not regret -for it has made me the man I am today In life I hunt, in years I gather - still undefeated against the reaper. This is 32. 🎈 🎂