Samuel Ijiyemi

If you venture out don’t be afraid, if you’re afraid don’t venture out. Go for it when you are convinced, people are not just lucky it is because they move there feet that God direct there way” “It can’t be all rosy, you don’t have to see all doom.

Classically Exceptionally ✝️⛪️ Love Of Christ Generation Church C&S Victoria Island Lagos, Where the Glory Of God Shines… . #LOCGeneration

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As a Man, pray you never find urself in a situation where only God knows that you are telling the truth.

As a Backend Engineer. Please learn: * API Design / Versioning / Idempotency * SQL / Indexing / Query Optimization * Caching / Invalidation / Redis * Message Queues / Kafka / RabbitMQ * Rate Limiting / Backpressure * Distributed Tracing / Observability * Load Balancing / Reverse Proxies * Consistency / Replication / Sharding This is where seniority starts.

I can't remember the last time I asked God for long life and good health. Na so so money I dey beg for everyday. 😥😭💔

I know you might not agree with me. But BAT is more intelligent than Obi

Community engagements.

“To be happy you must eliminate two things: The fear of a bad future and The memory of a bad past.” - Seneca

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.

Dumb people are impressed by complexity. Smart people are impressed by simplicity.

One young founder in Nigeria was in my DM asking i please help test his app. He needed someone outside the country to help test the multi currency local detection feature. I gave him my WhatsApp no immediately and he was surprised at the speed of my response. Who am I not to support? I am only privileged by God to be who I am today. I am nobody without God.

Anyone that has built or hired at scale understands the point Tosin of Moniepoint is trying to make. Finding one person is different from when you need 50 in a short while. And no, you cannot pass arround the same developers. Let's leave tech. Can you find great plumbers, mechanics, electricians in Nigeria? At scale? If you you want to repair a Mercedes with a complex problem in Lagos (10 million people) you'd be given the same 5 names. 3 would be those doing side waka from Coscharis. For Lekki Bridge, they imported people cos they could not find the 10 or so deep sea welders in Nigeria. Some skills take years to build and require systems. We are not talking tying gele, doing drop shipping. A global company competing no dey find who go "run am". There is a place for interns etc. But those are not the person that will build the company. We lied to ourselves that population = asset is where our problem stated. Nigeria has many problems and Tosin is not one of them. Go elsewhere and look for who will massage ya egos.

The real issue is that the "500 job openings" at Moniepoint do not exist. It's a popular corporate scam where you constantly recruit without actually hiring anyone, because showing a large number of job vacancies while advertising your aggressive recruitment campaign is a growth metric you display to investors. It shows that the company is "growing fast" which means they should invest more money. "We can't fill 500 job openings" in an absurdly deep job market like Nigeria is just a fintech bro performing for USD to locate him from whichever venture capital or private equity investor he's targeting. It's the same thing as when an NGO lawyer jumps on every trending human rights case without really achieving anything - it's a performance for the oyibo with USD to reward them. Motion without movement. Fake activity scam.

Congratulations to President Tinubu. I'm not a fan and I have been criticizing you for over a decade. Tbh, you are the least desperate politician Nigerians have ever witnessed. You sacrificed your ambition in 2007, and 2015 for you to be President today. In a country where everyone wants to be President at the same time. You have shown that you don't have to be desperate to win. I'm not your fan and I will still continue to criticize you. However, recent happenings in our polity have shown that you are a rare one. I wish you the very best!

You’ll eventually pay for staying too long in environments that don’t stimulate your growth.

If you want a life that feels like yours, you have to get in touch with your inner madness. Become a rebel. Unapologetically you. Take the path nobody dares to walk. Read 700 page philosophy books. Work for a month straight. Build something from nothing. Then disappear for a week. Don't be rational. Don't be logical Don't be normal ever. Be rare. Be obsessive. Be exactly who you are. This one mindset shift can absolutely change everything.

No matter how suya sweet reach, aboki man no fit open by 7am, na akara woman time be that So relax, everything get him own time

@AramideOyekunle @paystack

Don't be shy, just tag the company you wish to work for!

WHO AUDITS NIGERIAN BANKS? 1 First HoldCo — KPMG 2 UBA — Ernst & Young 3 GT Bank (GTCO) — Ernst & Young 4 Access Bank (Access Holdings) — KPMG 5 Zenith Bank Plc — PwC 6 Ecobank Transnational Incorporated — Deloitte & Grant Thornton 7 Fidelity Bank — Deloitte 8 FCMB — Deloitte 9 Sterling Financial Holdings — Deloitte 10 Stanbic IBTC — KPMG 11 Unity Bank — KPMG 12 Wema Bank — KPMG 13 Jaiz Bank — Ahmed Zakari & Co 14 NPF Microfinance Bank — Deloitte 15 Abbey Mortgage Bank — PwC 16 Infinity Trust Mortgage Bank — PKF 17 Aso Savings & Loans — Sola Oyetayo & Co

The most unseen privilege in life: a supportive family.