Nigeria?s tech industry is fading fast due to brain drain

Nigeria’s former storming tech hub ecosystem has attracted hundreds of millions in investment, but is now losing out to other tech heartlands due to salary shortfalls.

The African state was one of the first to recognise the financial potential of the boom in tech, creating a decade of tech hub launches, triumphs and the arrivals of tech giants such as Mark Zuckerberg. However, over the past year or so, the top-talent expat software engineers central to the hub’s rapid development are packing up and leaving for more lucrative destinations on the continent and elsewhere.

As always nowadays, it’s all about earning power and the quality of life able to be purchased. Lagos still holds the reputation of being the most valuable of Africa’s massive tech ecosystems, but its salaries for the software engineers who created the miracle are now sadly lacking. For example, those working in Lagos earn some $5.000 less per year than their counterparts in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and it’s this shortfall which is fuelling the exodus of talent to more rewarding locations.

Salary shortfalls aren’t the only reason the best software engineers are moving on, as Lagos nowadays gives fewer opportunities for growth as professionals, thus limiting the technical abilities of ambitious expatriate experts. Problem solving is at the heart of the tech profession, with present-day Lagos falling short on offering the range of problems which spurred the brightest and best to arrive and find solutions. Limiting the acquiring of new skills leading to fast career advancement is likely to spell doom for the city as a world tech hub. Due to the exodus of high-end talent, local Nigerian start-ups can’t compete with the fast-growing centres in North America and Europe.