Why Moniepoint’s 500 Open Roles Are an Investment Opportunity, Not a Talent Crisis, And the Akungba Compact That Could Solve It
On a Lagos stage in May 2026, a unicorn CEO said he could not find 500 Nigerians good enough to fill his open roles. The frustration was real. The diagnosis was incomplete. This piece names the gap, and proposes the specific compact, with a specific university, that closes it.
Seun Oluwashina Ajongbolo·Federal House of Representatives Candidate · Akoko South East / South West · Ondo State·Akungba-Akoko · Lagos · Abuja·11 May 2026·16 min read
I.The Frontier
On May 1st, 2026, on the stage at The Platform in Lagos, Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda told a roomful of operators something that has since echoed across Nigerian X. He had 500 open roles. He could not find Nigerians good enough to fill them. He pointed at the education system. He pointed at ASUU strikes. He pointed at social media culture. He pointed, most controversially, at what he described as a decline in the level of reasoning among Nigerian youth.
The frustration was real. Anyone who has tried to scale a high-growth tech company in Nigeria recognises the pain behind those words. But the diagnosis was incomplete in a way that matters, and the way it was incomplete is the most important thing a Nigerian tech CEO could understand right now.
This article is about that gap. It is also about what an actual solution looks like, not in theory, but in a specific place, with a specific university, with a specific pipeline that could be built starting this quarter.
II.The Fact
Let’s deal in numbers, because the story is best told that way.
The Moniepoint position, as of May 2026:
– $110 million Series C funding round led by Google. – “Unicorn” status at $1 billion valuation. – Over ₦1 trillion MSME credit disbursed in 2025 alone. – Acquisition of Orda Africa in March 2026, expanding into hospitality and restaurant software. – 500 open roles, reportedly unfillable from local talent pools.
The Pay Comparison That Explains Everything
The table below shows what the same role pays in Nigeria, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. The currency conversion uses an approximate rate of ₦1,584 to $1 USD, the same conversion implied in publicly reported figures for Nigerian developers earning ₦85 million annually from foreign remote contracts.
| Role | Nigeria (local) | US market | UK market | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Support / Operations | ₦166k–₦730k/mo ($1,260–$5,530/yr) | $40,000–$60,000/yr | £25,000–£40,000/yr ($31k–$50k) | 7–30× |
| Entry-Level Developer (0–1 yr) | ₦50k–₦250k/mo ($378–$1,890/yr) | $72,000–$95,000/yr | £25,000–£35,000/yr ($31k–$44k) | 30–160× |
| Junior Developer (2–3 yrs) | ₦150,000/mo ($1,140/yr) | $85,000–$120,000/yr | £35,000–£50,000/yr ($44k–$63k) | 40–100× |
| Senior Software Engineer | up to ₦4M/mo ($30,300/yr) | $127,000–$193,000/yr; Big Tech $200k–$400k+ | £85,000–£110,200/yr ($107k–$138k) | 4–13× |
| Senior Product Manager | ₦3.78M+/mo ($28,640/yr) | $130,000–$200,000/yr | £73,400–£100,000/yr ($92k–$125k) | 4–7× |
| Nigerian Remote Dev (foreign firm) | ₦85M/yr ($53,658/yr) | $53,658 base equivalent | $53,658 base equivalent | 1× |
Compensation comparison, same role, three labour markets. Figures aggregated from Ravio Compensation Trends Report (October 2025), Built In, Glassdoor, Indeed, and Gini Talent Global Software Engineer Salary Guide 2025.
Read that table once. Then read it again. The right-most column is the one that ended this conversation before Tosin Eniolorunda walked on stage.
A Nigerian junior developer’s choice in 2026 is not between Moniepoint and Flutterwave. The choice is between ₦150,000 a month from Moniepoint and the dollar equivalent of roughly ₦7 million a month from a remote contract with a US firm, same desk, same laptop, same hours, same code. That is a 40-to-100× wage gap for the same labour.
No amount of “intellectual decline” rhetoric closes that gap. No bootcamp graduate, no matter how disciplined, talks themselves into the local offer once they have seen the foreign one.
The Systemic Context Behind the Numbers
The pay gap does not exist in a vacuum. It compounds inside a system already producing strain at every level:
– The 2024 federal minimum wage of ₦70,000 was effectively erased by 33%+ inflation within months of taking effect. – Federal universities shuttered for nine months between 2020 and 2022 due to ASUU strikes, costing many graduates two to three academic years. – The National Universities Commission’s Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards (BMAS) are reviewed periodically, but actual implementation at the departmental level remains sluggish and inconsistent. – The Industrial Training Fund’s SIWES placements pay stipends that are routinely delayed for months and rarely link students to real production environments. – The Personal Income Tax framework, even after the sweeping Nigeria Tax Act 2025 reforms, contains no provision that gives individual Nigerians a tax benefit for donating to a Nigerian university.
This is not a talent shortage. This is an unbuilt pipeline. And it was never the graduates’ job to build it.
III.What Eniolorunda Said, and What Was Missing
Let me be fair to the man. Tosin Eniolorunda built a unicorn. His frustration is not theoretical. When he stood on that stage and reported that the level of reasoning in the country is not what it used to be, he was reporting from inside an interview process where he is genuinely failing to convert candidates into hires. That feeling is real, and so is the cost.
He is also not wrong about every diagnosis. ASUU strikes have eaten years of academic time. The curriculum at most Nigerian universities is built on foundations laid two decades ago. Some graduates do enter the workforce with real gaps in professional communication and structured problem-solving. These are facts on the ground.
But here is what is also a fact, and what was missing from the Lagos remarks: Moniepoint has been exceptionally successful at raising capital. It has been less successful at the much older, much less glamorous discipline of building the workforce that capital requires. Those are not the same skill, and the absence of the second is not the candidates’ fault.
The companies that have solved this problem in Nigeria already exist. Shell, NLNG, TotalEnergies, Mobil, Chevron, the entire Nigerian oil and gas sector figured out the talent question thirty years ago. They did it through a four-part playbook every operator in this country knows by heart:
1. Scholarship pipelines into the universities that produce their feeder talent. 2. Rigorous, well-compensated graduate trainee programmes that bridge theory to practice. 3. International rotation through Aberdeen, Houston, and The Hague to expose talent to global standards. 4. Compensation calibrated to the scarcity of the skill, not the desperation of the candidate.
The result was an entire generation of Nigerian engineers who today lead global projects from Lagos to London to Houston. The playbook is public. It works. It has worked for three decades. It is sitting on the shelf, waiting for the tech sector to read it.
Internationally, the same logic plays out. Stripe built its engineering bench through internal education and public technical content. Google built its talent funnel through Summer of Code and structured apprenticeships. Paystack, the closest peer in the Nigerian fintech world, built its team through years of community events and intentional campus outreach long before its acquisition.
Moniepoint, to its credit, does not start from zero on this. The Tosin Eniolorunda Design Lab at OAU exists. The DreamDevs Bootcamp exists. Women in Tech is on its sixth cohort. These are real and they are valuable. But they are not yet at the scale of the problem.
Five hundred open roles are not solved by one design lab and one bootcamp. Five hundred open roles are solved by an industrial-scale pipeline, structured the way Shell structures its pipeline, only adapted to fintech, faster, and cheaper.
That pipeline has not yet been built. Until it is, the 500 vacancies are not a measure of Nigerian intellectual decline. They are a measure of how much of the talent infrastructure Nigerian tech has chosen to outsource to luck.
IV.The Pay Question, Spoken Plainly
There is no honest version of this conversation that avoids the pay question, so let me put it plainly.
You cannot publicly demand global-standard output while privately offering ₦150,000 a month and call the resulting gap a talent shortage. That is not a market failure. That is a pricing failure, and the people who post those job advertisements know exactly what they are doing. They are betting that the current generation of graduates will not have the information, the boldness, or the visa pathways to take the foreign offer instead.
Let me break it to you: this is 2026, they do.
The table in Section II is the entire argument. A Nigerian developer with two years of solid experience can today take a remote contract with a US, UK, or European firm paying $2,000–$5,000 a month in stable foreign currency. The math is not subtle. The decision is not difficult. The brain drain is not a moral failing of the youth. It is a rational response to a rational offer.
If a Nigerian tech company wants to compete with that math, it has exactly two options.
The first option is to pay USD-indexed compensation, structure equity that actually vests, fund real learning and development budgets, and create career ladders that reward performance rather than seniority. Several Nigerian companies have started doing this. They are not the ones complaining about talent shortages.
The second option is to go upstream, to invest in producing the talent itself, on a faster cycle than the open market is willing to wait for, in partnership with universities that are right now graduating thousands of underemployed Nigerians whose only failing is that nobody has built the bridge between their training and the work.
This article is about that second option. Not because the first is wrong, it isn’t, but because the second is where Nigerian tech can pull ahead of foreign remote firms instead of just trying to match them on price.
V.The Akungba Compact
Here is what the bridge looks like.
Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko (AAUA) sits inside my federal constituency in Ondo State. It is one of the largest state universities in southwestern Nigeria, with active faculties in computer science, engineering, the sciences, and the social sciences. Its alumni already work at Meta, Barclays, AWS, and across the Lagos fintech scene, the same diaspora cohort whose loudest message to Eniolorunda after his Lagos remarks was that the system did not produce them; the system survived them, and what made the difference was what came after graduation.
The Akungba Compact is a three-pillar partnership framework I am proposing as a model, first for Moniepoint, then replicable for any Nigerian tech employer with more open roles than they can fill.
Pillar 1
Curriculum Co-Design
The employer’s senior engineers and product leads commit a structured number of hours per quarter to working with AAUA’s relevant departments, updating curriculum, advising on capstone projects, and bringing real production challenges into the classroom.
→ Cost: minimal. Impact: the 40-year curriculum problem starts closing within two semesters.
Pillar 2
Paid Pathways
A funded scholarship line at AAUA in target disciplines. A campus-hosted technical lab modelled directly on the Tosin Eniolorunda Design Lab at OAU, but adapted for software, data, and product. Formal SIWES hosting, with stipends paid on time, in real money, against real supervised projects. Bootcamp tracks for second- and third-year students that produce shippable work, not just certificates.
→ Moniepoint already has the OAU template. Akungba-Akoko is the next campus.
Pillar 3
Trainee-to-Hire Conversion
Top performers from Pillars 1 and 2 enter a 12- to 18-month structured graduate trainee programme. They are paid competitively against the foreign remote offer, not equal, but close enough that a 22-year-old can choose Akungba-trained-Lagos-employed over remote-Lagos-foreign-paid for reasons that include money, mentorship, equity, and country. They rotate through real product teams. They emerge as the pipeline Moniepoint cannot currently buy.
→ Three pillars. One campus to start with. A repeatable template after that.
The math on this is not large. A meaningful version of all three pillars at AAUA could be done for less than the cost of a single round of executive search retainers for those 500 roles. The difference is that the executive search retainers expire when the role is filled. The pipeline compounds.
VI.The Policy Frame: Making Education the Most Tax-Advantaged CSR in Nigeria
Voluntary good intentions do not scale across an economy. Tax codes do. If Nigeria is serious about closing the talent pipeline gap, the next legislative session must make educational investment the cheapest, most rewarded form of corporate spending in the country, and the most attractive form of giving available to wealthy individuals. That is not a slogan. It is a specific set of amendments to a piece of legislation that just passed.
Where the Law Stands Today
The Nigeria Tax Act 2025, signed by President Tinubu on 26 June 2025, consolidated four old levies (the Tertiary Education Tax, the Information Technology Levy, the NASENI levy, and the Police Trust Fund levy) into a single 4% Development Levy on the assessable profits of medium and large companies. Section 164 of the same Act preserves the long-standing rule that donations to approved educational institutions on the Fifth Schedule are deductible from taxable income, capped at 10% of profit before tax, and now extends that treatment to donations of capital assets as well.
Two structural problems remain inside that framework:
First, the deductibility cap is too low to incentivise transformative investment. A 10% deduction means a unicorn writing a ₦500 million check to a university partnership saves roughly ₦150 million in tax. That is something, but it is not the math that gets a CFO’s attention against alternative deployments of the same capital.
Second, the Personal Income Tax framework, even after the 2025 reforms, contains no provision allowing individual Nigerians a tax deduction for donations to Nigerian universities. A wealthy alumnus who wants to give ₦100 million to AAUA receives no tax benefit at all. Compare this to the United States, where Section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code allows individual donors to deduct up to 60% of adjusted gross income for charitable contributions, and where roughly 30% of all American giving goes to education as a direct result.
These two gaps explain why educational philanthropy in Nigeria is dwarfed by educational philanthropy in countries with similar GDP per capita. The will exists. The vehicle does not.
The Five Amendments
The first 100 days in the National Assembly should produce a single education-investment incentive bill containing five amendments to the existing tax framework:
Amendment 1
The Pipeline Super-Deduction
Amend Section 164 of the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 to allow a 150% deduction (instead of the current 100% within the 10% cap) for verified contributions to pipeline-class educational programmes, meaning curriculum co-design, scholarships, paid SIWES hosting, on-campus technical labs, and structured graduate trainee programmes at federally accredited universities.
→ A ₦500M qualifying contribution would deduct ₦750M from taxable income. The math now gets the CFO’s attention.
Amendment 2
The Pipeline Investment Credit
Introduce a new direct tax credit of 25% of qualifying pipeline spend (above a ₦50 million floor), creditable against the 4% Development Levy. This is not a deduction. This is a naira-for-naira reduction in tax liability, the same instrument that drives R&D investment in the United States and Singapore.
→ A company spending ₦200M on a verified university partnership would credit ₦50M directly against its Development Levy bill.
Amendment 3
Individual Donor Deductibility
Amend the Personal Income Tax provisions of the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 to allow individual donors a deduction of up to 25% of adjusted gross income for verified contributions to accredited Nigerian universities, polytechnics, and educational endowments.
→ Wealthy Nigerians currently giving anonymously and without tax benefit would have a structural reason to give publicly, at scale.
Amendment 4
Modernise the Fifth Schedule
The list of approved educational institutions for deductible donations should be expanded by ministerial order to include every federally accredited Nigerian university, polytechnic, and college of education, not just the historic colonial-era list.
→ This single administrative action would unlock dozens of deserving institutions, including Adekunle Ajasin University, that currently sit outside the framework.
Amendment 5
The SIWES Host Credit
Companies that formally register as Industrial Training Fund SIWES hosts and pay stipends above a defined floor (linked to the federal minimum wage) should receive an enhanced ITF reimbursement of 100%, up from the current 50%, provided they document real supervised work and conversion-to-hire outcomes.
→ Reward measurable performance, not abstract status.
What These Amendments Achieve
Together, the five amendments do four things at once. They make educational pipeline investment the cheapest form of CSR available to Nigerian corporations, cheaper than community giving, cheaper than environmental projects, cheaper than the Development Levy itself for companies that actively invest. They give wealthy Nigerian individuals a structural reason to give to Nigerian universities at scale for the first time in the country’s tax history. They create a measurable revenue line for Nigerian universities that does not depend on the federal budget cycle. And they let the government redirect a portion of the existing 4% Development Levy back toward institutions that are already producing pipeline outcomes, rewarding measurable performance, not abstract status.
The total cost to the federal treasury is small. The behavioural shift it triggers is large. And the political coalition that supports it, universities, the diaspora, the corporate sector, the technical workforce, and the millions of underemployed graduates whose futures it would change, is already assembled. It is waiting for legislators to write the bill.
If I am elected, that bill is the first one I sponsor.
VII.Why Now
The window has a closing date.
Every quarter that passes, more of Nigeria’s strongest engineering and product talent leaves the country for foreign remote work, structured graduate programmes at international firms, or Japa-route migration. The Skilled Worker Visa to the UK, the Express Entry pathway to Canada, the EU Blue Card, every one of those routes is more competitive than it was a year ago, and Nigerian applicants are succeeding at them in unprecedented numbers.
The talent that Moniepoint says it cannot find is not lost. It is leaving. It is also, in many cases, currently sitting in lecture halls in Akungba-Akoko, Ile-Ife, Nsukka, and Zaria, waiting for somebody to build the bridge from the lecture hall to the production deploy.
Eniolorunda is right that the level of reasoning in the country is not what it used to be, but only in a very specific way. The level of reasoning required to wait passively for the system to deliver finished engineers is not what it used to be. That generation is gone, and they were never coming back, and good for them. The level of reasoning required to build the pipeline yourself is what Nigerian tech CEOs are still working out.
The companies that solve this in 2026 will own the next decade of Nigerian fintech. The ones that keep tweeting about intellectual decline will hire from the same shrinking pool as everyone else, at the same escalating prices, with the same shrinking margins, until the math stops working.
VIII.The Author’s Position
I am a candidate for the Federal House of Representatives in Akoko South East / South West Federal Constituency, Ondo State. Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko sits inside that constituency.
My professional background is unusual for a Nigerian politician. I have spent roughly eight years in cloud engineering, DevOps, business analysis, and product development & management roles. I am currently completing my MSW with an orientation toward human and community development. I understand, from both sides of this conversation, what it takes to convert a Nigerian undergraduate into a globally competitive professional, because I am one of the people the system tried and failed to retain, and one of the people who came back.
I am not running on a slogan that says Nigerian youth are unemployable. I am running on a thesis that says Nigerian youth have been underinvested in by the people loudest about complaining that they are unemployable, and the path forward is for those same people, particularly the ones now running unicorns built on the labour and loyalty of those same youth, to invest in producing the workforce they want to hire, with the federal government structuring a tax framework that rewards them for doing so.
To Tosin Eniolorunda specifically: your frustration was heard. Your CSR record is real. The OAU Design Lab is proof of what a serious Moniepoint partnership can produce. Akungba-Akoko is the next chapter. The students are there. The faculty are there. The local government will partner. And if I win this seat, the federal office will write the bill that gives this kind of compact tax stability and replicable structure across the country.
To other Nigerian tech CEOs reading this: the same offer applies. The Compact is not exclusive. AAUA is one campus. There are dozens like it across the country, each waiting to be matched with an employer willing to invest at the front of the pipeline instead of bidding on the back of it.
The students of Akoko South East / South West have the zeal. AAUA has the foundation. The framework is on this page. The capital exists, on both sides of the table. The legislative amendments are drafted in everything but final form.
The pipeline was never built. Let’s build it.
With the right partners, the right policy, and the right framework, the sky is not the ceiling for these students. It is the starting point.
