Nigeria is a fascinating country.
It is perhaps the only place on earth where a young man can leave Lagos on Monday as an “unemployable graduate” and arrive in London on Friday as a “highly skilled professional.”
Something miraculous happens at Heathrow Airport. Immigration officers stamp not only passports, it would seem, but competence.
In May this year, Moniepoint founder Tosin Eniolorunda stirred a national conversation when he lamented that hundreds of vacancies in his company could not easily be filled because many applicants lacked the skills and mindset required to compete globally.
Around the same time, discussions about the Dangote Refinery produced another interesting claim: that without significant foreign expertise, particularly Indian talent, Africa’s most ambitious industrial project might never have found its feet.
Add to this the frequent complaints from employers that our universities are producing graduates with certificates heavier than their practical abilities, and one begins to hear a familiar refrain:
Nigeria has plenty of people but too few individuals prepared for the demands of modern global enterprise.
It is a disturbing proposition.
Yet it raises an even more disturbing question.
If Nigerians are inherently uncompetitive, why do other countries keep importing them?
Why do our doctors and nurses somehow become excellent immediately after crossing international borders?
Why do Nigerian academics thrive in elite universities abroad?
Why do our students routinely emerge as international prize winners, scholars and valedictorians?
And why, for goodness sake, do footballers and athletes of Nigerian origin keep forcing their way into first teams from London to Lisbon?
Surely, they did not all attend secret schools hidden somewhere in the Sambisa Forest on the eve of departure.
The same genetic stock.
The same villages and neighbourhoods.
The same universities we love to criticize.
The hardware, it would appear, is not the problem.
The software might be.
Or, more accurately, the operating system and environment.
Because Nigerians have developed a remarkable superpower: the ability to adjust instantly to whatever system surrounds them.
Place them in societies where rules matter, institutions function and excellence is rewarded, and they perform accordingly.
Place the same individuals inside systems where effort and reward have only a casual relationship, and survival becomes a more useful skill than innovation.
The problem, therefore, may not be a shortage of talent.
It may simply be a shortage of ecosystems that allow talent to breathe.
Of course, this is not to canonize Nigerian workers. Some employees arrive at work with the enthusiasm of people attending a compulsory village meeting. Some believe punctuality is an abstract Western philosophy. Others think productivity means finding increasingly creative ways to look busy. Yet others spend entire careers plotting how to take home more money than their employment letters stipulate – even if that means wrecking the entire organization.
But employers, too, are not entirely innocent.
Many organizations advertise for “dynamic self-starters” when what they actually seek are miracle workers willing to perform the duties of five people for the salary of half a person.
They demand Silicon Valley outputs while providing Computer Village infrastructure.
One young woman who once worked at Moniepoint offered a fascinating counterpoint to the current debate. She described a work environment marked by intense pressure, low compensation, vague expectations and a revolving-door culture in which youthful enthusiasm was treated as a renewable natural resource.
Whether her experience represents the norm is another matter. But her account raises an important question:
What kind of institutions are we building, and what kind of people do those institutions eventually produce?
I have seen both worlds.
I once worked in an organization that felt like a labour camp with air conditioning.
People counted the hours until closing time with the precision of prison inmates marking days on a wall.
Later, I worked in another organization where people voluntarily stayed back deep into the night to perfect projects and deliver results.
Nobody forced them.
Nobody threatened them.
People simply felt ownership.
They believed the institution belonged to them and that its success reflected their own dignity.
Both organizations were Nigerian.
The difference was not nationality.
It was culture.
The unwritten rules.
The invisible contract between employer and employee.
The spirit of the place.
And that brings us to Nigeria itself.
Because Nigeria is, in many ways, merely the largest company in the land.
A gigantic enterprise called Nigeria Plc.
How emotionally invested are its citizens in its success?
How many young people wake up genuinely convinced that tomorrow will reward today’s sacrifices?
How much loyalty can one reasonably expect from people who increasingly see emigration not as an adventure but as both a survival strategy and a retirement plan?
The questions are uncomfortable, but unavoidable.
Which brings me to my final thought.
Suppose we took a globally celebrated genius from Silicon Valley and relocated him permanently to Computer Village, Ikeja.
Let us check on him after five years.
My suspicion is that the great innovator would still be intelligent. But he might also have acquired new competencies: negotiating diesel prices, calculating inverter cycles, dodging traffic diversions, managing generator fumes and developing a philosophical acceptance of institutional uncertainty.
In short, he might gradually evolve from global tech icon into world-class hustler.
Not because his brilliance diminished.
But because his environment reassigned his priorities.
So, before we conclude that Nigerian youths are not good enough, perhaps we should first ask a more difficult question:
Is Nigeria today good enough for the aspirations, energies and hopes of its own young people?
Because, remarkably, the same human beings we sometimes dismiss as unemployable at home often become indispensable abroad.
And that should tell us that the real crisis may not be human resources at all.
It may simply be the values, systems and institutions available to harness human resources.
It may simply be that Nigeria’s greatest export is the very talent it struggles to recognize, reward and retain at home.
*Victor Anazonwu is on the Editorial Board of The Renaissance Online Magazine. He is an author and teaches Economic History at the International Center for Regional Integration and Trade Research (ICRITR), Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. Email: victor.elipses@gmail.com
