Why Do Some Jobs Remain Difficult to Fill Despite High Unemployment?
Here is a sentence that should make every Nigerian angry: a Lagos manufacturing firm spent over six months in 2023 searching every university and polytechnic in the country for two chemical ecologists, and found no one. It gave up and flew the skills in from India. Meanwhile, millions of Nigerians wake up every day with no job at all. It is always easier to wave a “youth unemployment” statistic and move on than to admit that Nigeria’s job market has quietly stopped being favourable for job seekers. The problem therefore, is not simply unemployment. It is a mismatch, a mismatch that should concern everyone.
The United Nations Development Programme says more than 600,000 graduates enter Nigeria’s labour market every year, while employers continue to report gaps in work readiness. But the numbers do not tell the whole story. Nigeria’s labour market can look completely different depending on which number you choose to focus on – look at the number of unemployed people and you see a country where people desperately need opportunities. Look at individual employers and you may see companies complaining that suitable candidates are difficult to find.
The 2025 Lagos Economic Development Update highlighted this contradiction. It reported average monthly labour demand of 2,837 vacancies against 3,318 jobseekers. On paper, that sounds as though there should be enough people to fill the available jobs. But 816 of those jobseekers lacked both education and experience, leaving a much smaller pool of candidates considered employable for those vacancies.
NISER’s Q1 2026 Job Vacancy Analysis also makes a similar point from another angle. Its analysis of 778 advertised vacancies between January and March 2026 found persistent structural imbalances in Nigeria’s formal labour market, including a shortage of entry-level opportunities for graduates, regional disparities and continuing challenges in matching skills development with labour demand.
This is not entirely new, a 2018 study of Nigeria’s chemistry curriculum and chemical industries found that chemistry graduates possessed theoretical knowledge that was broadly relevant to industry but did not meet the minimum skills requirements expected by employers. So perhaps the problem is not that Nigerian graduates know nothing. Perhaps many know plenty, but the problem may be that they have not been given enough opportunities to learn how to apply what they know, and that is a very different problem.
Then came the Moniepoint controversy
The debate became much harder to ignore in May 2026 when Moniepoint CEO Tosin Eniolorunda said his company was struggling to fill about 500 vacancies. According to The Guardian and Punch, Eniolorunda said Moniepoint had deliberately decided to prioritise Nigerian recruitment but was struggling to find candidates in the quantity and quality required. He said some of the candidates identified did not meet the company’s global standards.
That statement immediately touched a nerve, which is understandable. Imagine being a Nigerian graduate, applying for dozens of jobs and being told repeatedly that you are not experienced enough. Then you hear that a Nigerian company has hundreds of vacancies but cannot find enough qualified Nigerians to fill them.
It definitely sounds absurd, but there is another side to the argument. Following the backlash, Eniolorunda clarified that the concern was particularly about senior technical talent and pointed towards brain drain, weak talent pipelines and shortcomings in the education system. Pulse Nigeria reported that Moniepoint also said it pays above-market salaries and invests in talent development.
The response was not universally accepted. The Guardian reported that organised labour questioned whether employment terms offered by companies are always competitive enough to attract and retain the skills they require.
That disagreement introduces another question we often avoid. What if Nigeria does not have only a skills crisis, what if it also has a pay crisis?
Employers are right to want competent people. A company cannot compete internationally if its employees lack the technical skills required to do the work. But employees are also entitled to ask what they are being offered in return.
Nigeria has experienced years of high inflation and a sharp deterioration in purchasing power. A professional may technically have the skills for a position and still decide that the salary, working conditions or career prospects do not justify taking it.
Companies also need to know this: You cannot keep telling Nigerians to acquire globally competitive skills while offering them opportunities that cannot compete with the cost of living. You cannot complain about brain drain while treating the departure of skilled workers as though it has nothing to do with wages, working conditions or career progression.
That reasoning also matters when we describe a job as “hard to fill”.
Hard to fill for whom?
Hard to fill because nobody has the required skill?
Hard to fill because qualified people have left the country?
Hard to fill because employers want experienced candidates for entry-level salaries?
Or hard to fill because the available workers have other options?
These are not the same problem, and blaming graduates for all of them is too convenient.
Migration
Nigeria is also losing skilled people to migration. In the Moniepoint debate, brain drain was identified as one of the factors affecting the availability of senior technical talent. World Bank research published in 2026 also highlights the enormous economic cost of weaknesses in learning and workforce skills, estimating that existing human-capital deficits in Nigeria amount to 111 per cent of future earnings.
Nigeria cannot simply train people and then watch them leave. Nor can companies expect an endless supply of highly experienced workers without investing in how those workers are developed.
But everyone keeps blaming the wrong people
For years, the easiest explanation has been that Nigerian graduates are unemployable. Then they say young people do not have enough skills, universities are producing half-prepared graduates, and employers cannot find the talent they need. There is truth in parts of that argument, but it becomes dangerous when it turns into a convenient excuse for everybody else.
Universities have a responsibility to make education relevant to the economy. Government has a responsibility to create an environment where businesses can grow and create productive jobs. Employers have a responsibility to develop talent rather than expecting every graduate to arrive fully formed. And young people themselves have a responsibility to keep developing their skills beyond the classroom.
There is no single villain here, just a broken connection. Simply creating more graduates or more vacancies is not enough. The labour market needs better information and a stronger connection between education, training and actual demand.
The Lagos State Employment Trust Fund has previously examined how skills available in the workforce match the needs of employers across sectors. The Federal Ministry of Labour’s National Electronic Labour Exchange was also designed to connect employers with people whose skills match their requirements.
So what actually fixes the problem?
There is no magic policy that will suddenly make Nigeria’s labour market work, everyone has to work together. Universities need to become more responsive to changing industries. Employers need to build stronger graduate-training pipelines instead of expecting young applicants to arrive with years of experience. Professional and technical training needs to receive far more attention than it’s given. And the government needs better labour-market information so that education and workforce planning are based on what the economy actually needs.
At the same time, higher salaries alone will not solve a genuine skills shortage. A company cannot pay its way out of a situation where there simply are not enough people with the required expertise.
Ultimately, the real answer is not the classroom or the paycheck, it is both.
Nigeria needs an education system that teaches people how to work, an economy capable of creating productive jobs, employers willing to train people, and compensation that gives skilled Nigerians a reason to build their careers at home.
The biggest mistake would be to reduce this entire problem to one sentence: “Nigerians do not have the skills.” That may explain part of the story, but it does not explain all of it.
And until we are willing to ask harder questions about education, training, wages, working conditions, migration and employer expectations, Nigeria may continue living with the strangest contradiction in its labour market: millions looking for work while some employers are looking for people they cannot find.