Taro by Alt-J

When I saw the comments about there not being enough senior talent in Nigeria, I didn’t get angry immediately.

I just sat there.

Because after years of working, learning, building, certifying, sacrificing sleep, fixing systems, taking contract roles, getting poached by recruiters, getting dragged through long hiring cycles, and then being discarded with polished rejection emails… I’ve come to realize something:

The problem in this market is not just talent.

It’s trust.

And if we’re being honest, it runs deeper than tech.

It starts from the systems many of us grow up in.

You walk into certain government offices and quickly realize merit is not always the first language being spoken.

Sometimes it’s who knows who.

Sometimes it’s whose uncle is where.

Sometimes it’s someone less qualified sitting in the seat because they had access, while someone else is outside the gate with the skill, the hunger, and the receipts—but no connection.

You learn that very early.

You learn that being capable and being chosen are not always the same thing.

And that lesson follows you into the private sector too.

People say Nigeria has a cybersecurity talent shortage.

Does it?

Or do we have a pipeline problem?

How many young engineers genuinely get access to proper labs, mentorship, threat simulations, enterprise environments, cloud budgets, red team exposure, incident response culture, or security architecture guidance?

How many people are learning security from unstable power, limited hardware, expensive data, no enterprise exposure, and YouTube videos—yet are somehow expected to compete with people trained inside mature ecosystems?

Then after all that, when someone finally becomes good, what happens?

They leave.

Not because they hate home.

Because they’re tired.

Tired of politics.

Tired of contract roles where they’re doing permanent work.

Tired of being underpaid while being asked for “world-class standards.”

Tired of interview processes that feel more like endurance tests than actual assessments.

Tired of being told there’s a talent shortage while talented people are sitting in inboxes, being filtered out by systems that don’t even fully understand technical depth.

I’ve been there.

I’ve removed roles from my CV—not because I was ashamed of them, but because I knew some recruiter might misunderstand the story.

I’ve been approached by companies that made me believe they saw something in me, only for months to pass and the process to end with silence or a template rejection.

I’ve worked in environments where politics mattered more than output.

And after enough of that, you start questioning yourself.

Am I actually good?

Am I common?

Did all the late nights, certifications, failed deployments, lab work, production incidents, architecture diagrams, cloud migrations, security reviews… did any of it matter?

But the truth is, this market doesn’t only break people because they lack skill.

Sometimes it breaks people because it keeps asking them to prove themselves to systems that haven’t fully earned their trust.

So no.

I don’t believe Nigeria only has a talent shortage.

I believe we have a trust shortage.

Trust in institutions.

Trust in hiring.

Trust in leadership.

Trust that merit will actually be seen.

And until that changes, we will keep celebrating the few who break through…

While quietly losing thousands who were capable of building something great.