Moniepoint CEO's Remarks on Nigerian Talent Spark Backlash, Then Clarification

By Onyelukachukwu M. O. Obata | The Babcock Torch

Tosin Eniolorunda, Chief Executive of Moniepoint, ignited a wave of public criticism after comments he made at The Platform Nigeria on Workers' Day, May 1, where he said his company was struggling to find Nigerians who met its hiring standards, and expressed concern about what he called the declining "general IQ" of the country.

Speaking at the annual Lagos forum, Eniolorunda said Moniepoint currently had approximately 500 vacant positions it could not fill. "We're struggling to find people to fill those roles," he said. "The few people that we found were not up to the global standard of the quality that we needed."

And he went further, attributing the gap not only to emigration but to cultural shifts he said were reshaping how young Nigerians think. "I used to feel like Nigerians are really really bright — and I am honestly beginning to feel like we need to do something to prevent the general IQ of this country from going lower," he said, citing "hookup culture", social media consumption, "yahoo yahoo culture," and what he described as a generation without credible role models.

Backlash

His remarks, particularly the "general IQ" line, spread very quickly on social media and drew heavy criticism. Many commenters argued that Eniolorunda had misidentified the problem — framing as a talent deficit what was, in their view, a compensation and labour-market failure.

In a widely circulated video reposted by @NigeriaStories on X, one woman pushed back directly. "You want skillful workers, and you don't want to pay," she said, citing her own experience being hired by an employer with "an international mindset" despite holding only a secondary school certificate. She argued that the Nigerian hiring system, not Nigerian workers, was the source of the problem.

Somto Okonkwo (@General_Somto) put the challenge in starker terms: "Can you pay Nigerians global standard rates since you want Nigerians to provide global standard work for you in Nigeria?"

The compensation argument found broad resonance. @Iam_Kezmann wrote that "a typical Nigerian employer wants to employ a Nigerian with global standards skill but since the employment is in Nigeria and the applicant is a Nigerian, they won't want to pay them global standard rates." @kinnsokoye put it more bluntly: "He won't pay $5,000 a month but he wants you to perform as the people receiving the same fee abroad."

Others questioned Moniepoint's hiring practices specifically. One user, @JustifiedTech_, claimed to have interviewed with the company twice and alleged that Moniepoint had used take-home assignment code without following up or sending a rejection. @officialzekan described the 500 vacancies as "there for formality," suggesting the company was not seriously filling them.

Not all reactions were critical. @tosinarigbede described Moniepoint as "one of the highest-paying firms in Nigeria" and argued that the skills gap conversation was not new. "He didn't say anything new," he wrote. "The real issue is how we choose to interpret it." @V.Ambz_AX echoed the sentiment: "What the CEO said was actually right. Most of you are just reacting from emotion... The educational system is gradually draining."

Clarification

A couple days after the speech, Eniolorunda published a lengthy post on LinkedIn in which he considerably narrowed the scope of his original remarks.

He clarified that his concern was not about Nigerian workers generally but about "senior Nigerian talents still resident in Nigeria" — a pool he described as critically scarce. "We Nigerians are some of the most hardworking and gritty people in the world," he wrote, "but we are not producing enough technical ones and losing the small we produce to Japa."

He cited specific roles he said were difficult to fill: engineering vice presidents capable of managing payments infrastructure at scale, senior data scientists, and growth executives with experience scaling applications to tens of thousands of daily users. He also pointed to Nigeria's history of medical brain drain — noting that as of March 2024, the country had lost approximately 16,000 doctors primarily to the United States and the United Kingdom — as evidence of a much bigger structural challenge.

On education, he maintained that standards were falling. "The quality of education is also declining as our standard of education is lagging behind global counterparts," he wrote. However, he didn't address the "general IQ" framing directly.

Eniolorunda also disclosed that Moniepoint employs over 3,500 full-time staff, more than 90 percent of whom are Nigerian, and that the company is growing at 20 percent year-on-year. "We'd love a world where this is at 99% while building for the world," he wrote.

A Broader Debate

This controversy arrived against the backdrop of Nigeria's ongoing Japa wave — the mass emigration of skilled workers, particularly in technical fields, to countries offering higher wages and greater stability. It's a dynamic that has drawn comment from other prominent Nigerian executives; Eniolorunda noted in his LinkedIn post as well as with a comment during his May Day speech that Aliko Dangote had raised similar concerns.

The public response, however, suggested that for many Nigerians, the framing matters as much as the substance. The distinction between "Nigerian talent is scarce because it is leaving" and "Nigerian talent is not good enough" proved to be quite a significant one — and in the original speech, critics argued, Eniolorunda had collapsed the two.

Moniepoint did not respond to a request for comment from The Babcock Torch by the time of publication.

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