Sidiq

Lol, it’s not even decent. It’s high. The entry-level salary (junior associate/intern) for any technical role at Moniepoint is 1M+ per month. The current issue is that the TL is now filled with fake screenshots and personal views painted as objective discussions.

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.

@chymaker @DHKRULLAH Don’t get high on your own supply rule applies.

This is the most ridiculous lie that I have ever seen. HO is legally responsible for approving Licence to Sponsor for Companies and other Govt Agrncies but HO does not hold her own licence to sponsor 🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

@TosinOlugbenga @GammsApp Building settlewell.ai

I have a growing community of Nigerians in The Uk building startups. If you’re one, comment what you’re building and I will send you the community link. Community hosted on @GammsApp

Hi guys, I'm running a short survey to understand immigrant life in the UK better. The hard parts. The stuff nobody really talks about. It takes 3–5 minutes. settlewell.ai/research/tell-… Would really appreciate it 🙏

@hackSultan I’m interested in helping you test this🤔

I built a desktop app that does 5 things. You set up a company, and it can automatically: 1. Start handling customer support all on its own. 2. Scan LinkedIn, X, and Reddit every hour and look for people who post about needing your product or service, something similar, or your competitors. It also scans for people who complain about your competitors, then gets their name and email and reaches out with context from their post, explaining how your product or service can help them. 3. Manage sending out newsletters to your users continuously. You just have to set the frequency. It then tracks how people react to those emails and uses that data to improve the next emails it sends. 4. Allow you to make and post AI-generated videos directly to your company’s social media accounts. 5. Let you build websites and manage databases locally on your PC, and with one button, push them online instantly. You download the desktop app, set it up and let it run all part of your business for you. You just have to check in once in a while to see how things are going. Quite interesting.

New arrival… 💯 Nothing but premium.

@shipper_now Shipper

BREAKING: Today, we pulled the plug on vibe coding. I just witnessed my Mac erase a $31B company in 184 seconds. This is beyond absurd.

Try it : settlewell.ai

settlewell.ai is your personalised companion throughout your settlement. One place to have the that clarity when confusion is everywhere .

Situations like this is why I’m building settlewell.ai You can ask it any question and it gives you responses based on your visa status.

@Omojuwa I had this same thoughts recently! It’s insane. I wrote about it here : open.substack.com/pub/sidiqing/p…

After staring at the Artemis II photos for so long, I went asking the sort of questions babies ask. I found out yesterday humans haven’t dug lower than 2% into the earth. Thar’s the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia which is about 12.2 kilometres into the Earth’s crust. It was drilled by Soviet scientists between 1970 and 1994 on the Kola Peninsula, it remains the deepest artificial point on Earth by vertical depth. The distance to the centre of the Earth is roughly 6,371 kilometres. They reached 12km and couldn’t continue. Even at that depth, the temperature reached approximately 180°C which was far hotter than models had predicted. This is what halted drilling. The rock became so plastic under that heat and pressure that it behaved more like a fluid than a solid, making further progress impossible. The borehole was welded shut in 2005 as the site was abandoned. No country has since attempted to surpass it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Add this to the fact that we know more about Space than we do what’s beneath the Oceans!

@joyeneghalu @yewiedewie Thank you.

@sidiqing @yewiedewie This is a good one. Well done.

This quarter, if you’re building with AI and want some support or feedback, send me a DM, I’ll help you test and/or promote. May even add a quick call to give you feedback. This is not a funding opportunity o pls. Thanks and all the best! Keep building

Guys, 10k RTs no go far nau. Make we run am abeg. RT aggressively 🔃 #TheGatheringOn100

@hackSultan In your DM my chief

If you need $8000 in lovable credits, as long as you’re trying to use lovable to build a startup. RT this and send me a DM with the name of your startup.

UK immigration is one of the most stressful things a person can go through. You can just wake up and start having panic attacks. Is there a way tech can solve this? Closest I can think of is like Credit Karma but for immigration. Something deeply personalised to your own journey, your own visa, your own complexities. Why not? 🤔

Introducing Sovereign AI, the Government’s new £500m venture fund. Sovereign AI will support founders from day one to start here, scale here and win everywhere. sovereignai.gov.uk

How can I make this even better? I’d love your feedback. If you are yet to try Bismillah Duas, it's available on the App Store or at bismillahduas.com

Alhamdullilah. 5,000+ Adhkars done on Bismillahduas. One major feedback I’ve received is how to reduce the distraction when doing the adhkars. I’m exploring a watch app to make the adhkars less distracting. Built on the habit of counting with your fingers, now you can do your Dhikr right from your hand. Coming soon. ⌚️