By Omolaraeni Olaosebikan

There is a peculiar thing that happens to some Nigerians when they leave Nigeria. The employee once described as difficult suddenly becomes a star performer. The young professional told to “calm down” for asking too many questions becomes valued for initiative. The doctor, engineer, researcher or technologist who struggled to make an impact inside one system begins to flourish inside another.
We usually call it brain drain. Perhaps we should also ask what the brain was draining from. Nigeria unquestionably has a skills problem, but we have spent so much time asking whether our people are sufficiently skilled that we have paid too little attention to an equally uncomfortable question: what happens to capable people after we put them inside our institutions?

The skills deficit is real. A 2025 report cited by the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund found that 65 per cent of Nigerian employers regard skills gaps as a major barrier to organisational transformation. Employers are also searching for capabilities in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data, systems thinking and customer service. Nigeria therefore cannot pretend that every struggling employee is simply a misunderstood genius. Our education-to-employment pipeline needs serious repair.

But that is only half the diagnosis. A country can suffer a shortage of particular skills and simultaneously waste a disturbing amount of the talent it already possesses. Those realities are not contradictory.
Consider the labour market itself. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that informal employment accounted for 93 per cent of employment in the second quarter of 2024, while time-related underemployment stood at 9.2 per cent. The official unemployment rate was 4.3 per cent. The figures remind us that the question is no longer simply whether Nigerians are working. It is what kind of work they are doing, under what conditions, and how productively their abilities are being used.
Employment is not the same thing as productivity. Possessing talent is not the same thing as creating an environment in which talent can perform.

Put a highly capable person inside a system where approvals take weeks, initiative threatens hierarchy, technology is inadequate, promotion bears little relationship to merit, mistakes are punished more severely than inertia, and the safest career strategy is to agree with the most senior person in the room. Eventually, something predictable happens: the employee adapts.

Curiosity becomes caution. Initiative becomes compliance. Ideas become things discussed privately after meetings rather than offered during them. The organisation then looks at the diminished version of the employee it helped to create and concludes: our people are simply not good enough.
The cost goes far beyond individual frustration. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index Plus now looks not only at health and education but also at how skills develop during working life. For Nigeria, its 2025 assessment places the education pillar at 64, below the lower-middle-income-country median of 88. It estimates that increasing effective schooling to 12 years could raise labour earnings by about 20 per cent over the long term.

The important point is that human capital does not stop developing on graduation day. The workplace can sharpen ability, stretch it and reward it. It can also slowly diminish it.
That should make employers reconsider the fashionable complaint that “young people don’t want to work.” Some do not. Every generation has its share of entitlement, indiscipline and mediocrity. But leadership becomes lazy when anecdotes become a diagnosis of an entire generation.

Before declaring that talent has disappeared, organisations should examine what they reward. Do we reward the person who solves the problem, or the person who never challenges the boss? Do we promote competence or proximity? Can an employee respectfully disagree without being branded arrogant? When somebody brings a new idea, is the first instinct “How could this work?” or “Who authorised you?”
These questions are becoming more urgent because Nigeria is not operating in a closed labour market. The World Bank says about 3.5 million people enter Nigeria’s labour force every year. Weak creation of quality jobs, limited entrepreneurial opportunities and rising emigration make the challenge even sharper.
Our demographic advantage will therefore not become an economic dividend merely because Nigeria has millions of young people. Population becomes productive capital only when ability meets opportunity, tools, accountability and competent leadership.

This is also where the japa conversation deserves greater honesty. Salary matters. Security matters. Infrastructure and quality of life matter. But people also migrate towards systems: systems in which equipment works, processes are clearer, expertise carries weight, professional effort can produce an outcome and performance has a reasonable chance of being recognised.
When trained people repeatedly conclude that their abilities can create greater value elsewhere, retention cannot be solved entirely with patriotic appeals. Sometimes the problem is not simply that another country pays more. It is that another system allows the person to do more.

The private sector should resist reading this as criticism meant only for government. Dysfunction has no exclusive address. A beautifully branded company can still have a culture where information is hoarded, managers are insecure, meetings replace decisions and talented employees spend more energy navigating personalities than solving problems.
None of this absolves the Nigerian professional of responsibility. Talent without discipline is potential wasted. Qualifications without continuous learning expire quickly. The future workplace will increasingly reward adaptability, digital fluency, critical thinking, communication and the ability to learn faster than a job description changes.

Accountability must therefore run in both directions. Employees must keep developing themselves. Organisations must stop demanding world-class performance while preserving systems that punish world-class behaviour.
Nigeria needs to broaden the question. Yes, how do we produce better talent?

But also: how do we stop wasting the talent we produce? Our schools must improve. Businesses must train. Young professionals must keep learning. Yet organisations must also build cultures in which merit can breathe, managers lead rather than merely supervise, technology enables rather than frustrates, and intelligent disagreement is not mistaken for insubordination.

Perhaps, then, the Nigerian who suddenly excels abroad has not acquired an entirely new brain at Heathrow, Toronto Pearson or JFK. Sometimes what has changed is the ecosystem around that brain: the tools, expectations, incentives, consequences, processes and permission to perform.

That does not mean every Nigerian system fails or every foreign one succeeds. It means that before we conclude that our greatest problem is a shortage of capable people, we should examine the machinery into which we place them. A nation cannot complain indefinitely about losing its best minds while refusing to interrogate the conditions under which those minds are expected to work.

The story we tell about talent determines where we look for the solution. Blame the people, and we keep searching for better people. Examine the system as well, and we begin building places where good people can become exceptional. Nigeria needs both better-prepared talent and institutions capable of using that talent well and this is why the narrative matters.