Ngl, we all feel Nigeria is cooked, but do not know to what degree. What particular hit me was thus particular paragraph:
"This is one reason the Nigerian labour market is so strange. Employers ask for young people with ten years of experience because they want maturity without having paid for formation. Young workers want senior salaries because they know firms will discard them if they do not bargain aggressively. Firms underinvest in training because workers may leave. Workers leave because firms do not train, promote, or pay them enough. Everyone’s behaviour is individually understandable. The collective result is a low-capability equilibrium."
The Arrow observation about learning by doing is the structural insight that elevates this from a Nigerian talent debate to something with genuinely global implications and I dont think you've fully explored the scariest version of where your argument leads.
If firms are where senior talent gets built, and the mechanism is junior people being placed inside complex organisations where they encounter harder problems than school ever gave them, then the AI automation wave is about to create the exact same talent pipeline failure you describe in Nigeria but through a completley different cause.
Companies across every developed economy are automating the junior roles. The document review that taught junior lawyers how contracts actually work. The financial modelling that taught junior analysts what drives a business. The code review that taught junior engineers how production systems behave under load. Each of those tasks is being handed to AI because the cost saving is immediate and obvious. What isn't immediate or obvious is that those tasks were the training pipeline for the senior talent the company will need in five years.
Your phrase "we wait until recruitment then complain that candidates cannot write properly" applies with terrifying precision to what is about to happen globally. Companies will automate the junior work in 2026, save 30% on headcount, report it as efficiency gains, and then in 2031 discover they have no pipeline for the senior roles they desperately need. They'll blame universities. They'll blame "this generation." They'll blame everyone except the decision they made five years earlier to remove the developmental layer from their own organisation.
Nigeria's talent gap exists because the economy didn't produce enough firms that develop people. The global AI talent gap will exist because firms voluntarily dismantled thier own development infrastructure for a quarterly cost saving. Different cause, identical mechanism, same result.
The World Bank data on early childhood deficits compounding through adolescence maps onto the professional development curve perfectly by the way. A junior who misses their first two years of learning-by-doing in a firm is permanently behind, just like a child who misses early vocabulary development. The window exists and then it closes. Automating junior roles closes that window for an entire generation of professionals and the cost wont show up for half a decade.
Brilliant piece. This deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.
This is very good read. It takes a very holistic view of the Moniepoint revelation which in reality is a picture of the Nigerian state across different sectors. The economic situation in Nigeria has made survival the point of living in most sectors, such that training for capability has become a luxury.
As the author noted in the best terms, everything is indeed linked to everything in the end. In the higher education sector, for instance, becoming a well-rounded academic relies mostly on informal training now and you have to be determined to improve yourself personally because the underfunding in the public sector means junior staff members are overburdened with responsibilities that make the development of the needed capabilities herculean. While in the private higher education sector, most proprietors really care less about the conditions that make the formation of a real academic possible. Yes, they have the money but there is no structure in place that enables a deliberate staff enhancement. This gap will yet show in the administrative capabilities of these universities themselves in the not too distant future.
In the final analysis, this Moniepoint debate might be a fitting metaphor of what the country is grappling with in health, agriculture, education, energy, leadership, transportation, urban planning, etc.
The last sentence summarizes the whole article for me, and also distils all of the debate very succinctly. This is a really good idea and helps to reframe the debate. Even the CEO in question that diagnosed the problem could not really articulate the root cause, which to state simply is economic complexity or lack thereof.
I can't tell you how much I love this piece. You captured the essence of the problem instead of (as we are used to in Nigeria) simply parroting the symptom. This article should be recommended reading in Problem Definition for policy analysts. You actually explained why there aren't enough "employable graduates" as opposed to ranting about inanities.
As I always say, your writing should be recommended reading for Nigerians. Period.
You captured all the right points. I especially like the point you made about how human capital, like development itself, is about capabilities building. Building local capabilities is not a theoretical process but something that happens through the iterative cycle of doing and integrating feedback.
This piece reinforces my view that the firm is the most important unit in economic development, and that the volume, quality, and type of firms a country has matter enormously. Even if we significantly increase our education budget (as we should) and improve the quality of education in Nigeria, our human capital ceiling will remain low if we don't have the firms that demand these skills and train them, as you carefully described. In fact, as we already see in the medical sector, more education without adequate local demand may simply mean we are training competent workers at low cost for foreign companies and countries to hire.
The key point I take from this is that while our level of human capital determines the type of firms we can build or attract, it is equally true that the type of firms we have locally determines the level of our human capital. Any serious discussion of human capital should therefore not focus on education alone (or even culture), but on how we can attract or grow more of the firms that don't just demand our human capital but actively help develop it.
Reading this brilliant work from Kenya. When kenyan employers complain of " not up to par graduates "and not the bad economy shows that they also don't learn.
The Arrow "learning by doing" point lands hard here: if the economy generates mostly low-complexity tasks, people accumulate low-complexity experience regardless of individual intelligence or effort. The talent shortage complaint is really a structural critique, the senior pool is narrow because the economy producing it is narrow. Macro context this week reinforces how hard the path widens: with oil near $105 and global growth forecasts being revised downward, the very frontier firms that would train the next generation of complex problem-solvers face real capital pressure. More on the global picture in this week's economics roundup: https://substack.com/@twie
"...it means that by the time a child enters primary school, society has already made large investments in some children and large non-investments in others. The school then receives both groups and pretends it is starting from zero."
That part struck me really hard, that's literally the educational reality.
This is such a good analysis and it is valid for any developing country. Capabilities and opportunities are truly defined before one is born shaped by their environment and socioeconomic realities.
Ngl, we all feel Nigeria is cooked, but do not know to what degree. What particular hit me was thus particular paragraph:
"This is one reason the Nigerian labour market is so strange. Employers ask for young people with ten years of experience because they want maturity without having paid for formation. Young workers want senior salaries because they know firms will discard them if they do not bargain aggressively. Firms underinvest in training because workers may leave. Workers leave because firms do not train, promote, or pay them enough. Everyone’s behaviour is individually understandable. The collective result is a low-capability equilibrium."
Thank you for the indepth analysis 🙏🏽
The Arrow observation about learning by doing is the structural insight that elevates this from a Nigerian talent debate to something with genuinely global implications and I dont think you've fully explored the scariest version of where your argument leads.
If firms are where senior talent gets built, and the mechanism is junior people being placed inside complex organisations where they encounter harder problems than school ever gave them, then the AI automation wave is about to create the exact same talent pipeline failure you describe in Nigeria but through a completley different cause.
Companies across every developed economy are automating the junior roles. The document review that taught junior lawyers how contracts actually work. The financial modelling that taught junior analysts what drives a business. The code review that taught junior engineers how production systems behave under load. Each of those tasks is being handed to AI because the cost saving is immediate and obvious. What isn't immediate or obvious is that those tasks were the training pipeline for the senior talent the company will need in five years.
Your phrase "we wait until recruitment then complain that candidates cannot write properly" applies with terrifying precision to what is about to happen globally. Companies will automate the junior work in 2026, save 30% on headcount, report it as efficiency gains, and then in 2031 discover they have no pipeline for the senior roles they desperately need. They'll blame universities. They'll blame "this generation." They'll blame everyone except the decision they made five years earlier to remove the developmental layer from their own organisation.
Nigeria's talent gap exists because the economy didn't produce enough firms that develop people. The global AI talent gap will exist because firms voluntarily dismantled thier own development infrastructure for a quarterly cost saving. Different cause, identical mechanism, same result.
The World Bank data on early childhood deficits compounding through adolescence maps onto the professional development curve perfectly by the way. A junior who misses their first two years of learning-by-doing in a firm is permanently behind, just like a child who misses early vocabulary development. The window exists and then it closes. Automating junior roles closes that window for an entire generation of professionals and the cost wont show up for half a decade.
Brilliant piece. This deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.
This is an excellent comment, and this came to my mind as I read the article, although I could never put it as succinct and clear as you've done
Facts!
This is very good read. It takes a very holistic view of the Moniepoint revelation which in reality is a picture of the Nigerian state across different sectors. The economic situation in Nigeria has made survival the point of living in most sectors, such that training for capability has become a luxury.
As the author noted in the best terms, everything is indeed linked to everything in the end. In the higher education sector, for instance, becoming a well-rounded academic relies mostly on informal training now and you have to be determined to improve yourself personally because the underfunding in the public sector means junior staff members are overburdened with responsibilities that make the development of the needed capabilities herculean. While in the private higher education sector, most proprietors really care less about the conditions that make the formation of a real academic possible. Yes, they have the money but there is no structure in place that enables a deliberate staff enhancement. This gap will yet show in the administrative capabilities of these universities themselves in the not too distant future.
In the final analysis, this Moniepoint debate might be a fitting metaphor of what the country is grappling with in health, agriculture, education, energy, leadership, transportation, urban planning, etc.
Thanks for this piece.
The last sentence summarizes the whole article for me, and also distils all of the debate very succinctly. This is a really good idea and helps to reframe the debate. Even the CEO in question that diagnosed the problem could not really articulate the root cause, which to state simply is economic complexity or lack thereof.
The part about economic complexity reminds me of the first Ideas Untrapped episode with Affi.
I can't tell you how much I love this piece. You captured the essence of the problem instead of (as we are used to in Nigeria) simply parroting the symptom. This article should be recommended reading in Problem Definition for policy analysts. You actually explained why there aren't enough "employable graduates" as opposed to ranting about inanities.
As I always say, your writing should be recommended reading for Nigerians. Period.
Thank you, Tobi, for this excellent piece.
You captured all the right points. I especially like the point you made about how human capital, like development itself, is about capabilities building. Building local capabilities is not a theoretical process but something that happens through the iterative cycle of doing and integrating feedback.
This piece reinforces my view that the firm is the most important unit in economic development, and that the volume, quality, and type of firms a country has matter enormously. Even if we significantly increase our education budget (as we should) and improve the quality of education in Nigeria, our human capital ceiling will remain low if we don't have the firms that demand these skills and train them, as you carefully described. In fact, as we already see in the medical sector, more education without adequate local demand may simply mean we are training competent workers at low cost for foreign companies and countries to hire.
The key point I take from this is that while our level of human capital determines the type of firms we can build or attract, it is equally true that the type of firms we have locally determines the level of our human capital. Any serious discussion of human capital should therefore not focus on education alone (or even culture), but on how we can attract or grow more of the firms that don't just demand our human capital but actively help develop it.
God bless you for this. I want to give you a big hug. I couldn’t have articulated it better. Have been screaming this for years now.
Reading this brilliant work from Kenya. When kenyan employers complain of " not up to par graduates "and not the bad economy shows that they also don't learn.
Great piece!
Thanks for reading Adia. Big fan of your pub.
Oh wow...I'm proper chuffed. Thank you. Maybe Feyi can intro us one day!
That would be lovely. 🙏
I don’t think I’ve read a clearer assessment of just how treacherous the talent/human capital deficiency is. Thank you for sharing!
This is a good read, the writer explained the cause and effect of everything
This made me think beyond the problem and actually look at the root cause. Thank you for sharing.
The Arrow "learning by doing" point lands hard here: if the economy generates mostly low-complexity tasks, people accumulate low-complexity experience regardless of individual intelligence or effort. The talent shortage complaint is really a structural critique, the senior pool is narrow because the economy producing it is narrow. Macro context this week reinforces how hard the path widens: with oil near $105 and global growth forecasts being revised downward, the very frontier firms that would train the next generation of complex problem-solvers face real capital pressure. More on the global picture in this week's economics roundup: https://substack.com/@twie
"...it means that by the time a child enters primary school, society has already made large investments in some children and large non-investments in others. The school then receives both groups and pretends it is starting from zero."
That part struck me really hard, that's literally the educational reality.
This is such a good analysis and it is valid for any developing country. Capabilities and opportunities are truly defined before one is born shaped by their environment and socioeconomic realities.