Nigeria has become remarkably good at celebrating what government can photograph. Roads, bridges, and public buildings offer visible evidence of activity; they can be commissioned, named, and displayed as proof of performance. Yet some of the most consequential acts of government are less visible. They involve building institutions, developing human capability, and creating systems whose true value may only become apparent years later.

That distinction matters in a federation. Nigeria’s 36 states should be more than administrative extensions of Abuja. They should be laboratories of development—places where ideas in education, healthcare, agriculture, technology, and economic management are tested against local realities, improved through experience and, where successful, replicated elsewhere. The next phase of Nigeria’s development will depend not simply on how much governments build, but on how intelligently they govern.

Through this lens, Enugu Talent City deserves attention.

Its importance is not that Enugu is building another technology hub. Nigeria already has enough innovation centres whose ambitions have exceeded their outcomes. The more interesting proposition is that the state is attempting to connect skills development directly to employment, commercial infrastructure, and international demand.

That addresses one of the least understood dimensions of Nigeria’s unemployment crisis.

The country does not suffer only from a shortage of jobs. It also suffers from a mismatch between the capabilities produced by its education system and those demanded by a rapidly changing economy. Every year, graduates enter the labour market carrying certificates but often lacking sufficient exposure to practical, employer-ready skills. At the same time, companies working in software, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data services, customer experience, and finance struggle to find suitably trained personnel.

The tragedy is obvious: unemployment and talent shortages can exist simultaneously.

Enugu Talent City seeks to bridge that divide. Its proposed architecture combines a 750-seat Business Process Outsourcing facility anchored by HUMATRIX at the Old CCB Building with a 2,000-seat Knowledge Process Outsourcing campus at the Nigerian Communications Commission Digital Industrial Park. The HUMATRIX Enugu -BPO facility is intended to support customer experience, finance and accounting, technical support, and back-office services, while the KPO campus would target higher-value capabilities including software engineering, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data analytics, and digital research. But the most important numbers are not the number of seats.

The defining idea is simpler: training must lead somewhere.

Nigeria has no shortage of skills programmes. Governments, development agencies, and private organisations routinely announce boot camps, empowerment initiatives, and certification schemes. Too often, however, success is measured by how many people were trained rather than by what happened to them afterwards.

Participants collect certificates and return to the same labour market from which they came.

Enugu’s model attempts to change that equation. Digital skills programmes, university partnerships, certification initiatives, innovation challenges, and job-matching mechanisms are designed to feed directly into an ecosystem of outsourcing businesses. If properly implemented, employability rather than enrolment becomes the measure of success.

That is a profound shift in thinking.

Public policy in Nigeria frequently measures inputs and activities: money spent, workshops organised, equipment purchased and people trained. Sustainable development demands harder questions. How many people secured jobs? What do they earn? How many remain employed? How many progress into more sophisticated roles? How many eventually start businesses? How much export revenue is being created?

The BPO-KPO structure is potentially valuable because it creates a ladder rather than a single destination.

A young person might begin in customer support, shared services, or back-office operations, gain professional experience and exposure to international clients, acquire additional certifications, and ultimately progress into software engineering, artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity, or financial services. Such mobility matters. Digital development must produce careers, not merely temporary work.

This is also where Enugu must resist an important temptation.

Nigeria cannot build a durable digital economy simply by becoming a source of cheap labour for richer countries. Low wages may offer an initial competitive advantage, but they cannot be the destination. Another country can always compete more cheaply. Sustainable advantage comes from increasing capability and moving continuously towards higher-value services, intellectual property, product development, and entrepreneurship.

The ultimate ambition, therefore, should not simply be that Nigerians work for global companies from Enugu. It should be that some of those Nigerians eventually build companies capable of serving the world from Enugu.

There is an equally important lesson about infrastructure.

Across Nigeria, technology parks, innovation centres, and digital facilities have sometimes been treated as though buildings, computers and broadband automatically create innovation. They do not. Infrastructure without an operating model can quickly become another expensive public asset searching for a purpose.

Enugu Talent City is more promising in conception because it attempts to combine public infrastructure with private-sector execution. Under the proposed public-private partnership structure, government provides strategic assets, infrastructure, and policy support, while private operators are expected to bring technology, commercial discipline, international clients, and operational expertise.

That division of responsibility is crucial.

Government can provide continuity, infrastructure, and an enabling environment. But global outsourcing markets operate through competitive pricing, service-level agreements, security requirements, and rapidly changing technologies. The facilities must therefore operate as commercial enterprises, not as conventional public institutions wearing technology labels.

Reliable electricity, broadband connectivity, cybersecurity, privacy protection, secure data infrastructure, and internationally recognised compliance standards will matter more than ceremonial openings.

The larger significance of Enugu’s experiment lies in whether its underlying model can travel.

Replication should not mean that every governor constructs a building called a “Talent City.” Nigeria has suffered enough from the tendency to copy projects without understanding the systems that make them work.

What should be replicated is the logic: begin with market demand; design training around employers; deploy public assets intelligently; attract competent private operators; provide reliable infrastructure; measure employment, earnings, exports, and career progression; and create governance arrangements capable of surviving changes of administration.

Each state can then build around its own comparative advantage. The precise industries will differ. What matters is the discipline of connecting education and skills to identifiable economic opportunity.

This also raises a broader question about how Nigerians define good governance.

Political incentives follow public recognition. When achievement is judged almost entirely by visible construction, leaders will understandably prioritise projects that can be photographed and commissioned before the next election. But when citizens, media and institutions also value fiscal responsibility, educational reform, stronger institutions and human-capital development, the definition of political success changes.

Enugu has recently been presented as an example of this broader development orientation, with progress associated with fiscal discipline, revenue mobilisation, transparency, and investment across sectors including education, healthcare, infrastructure, security, agriculture, and transportation.

Talent City now provides another test of that ambition.

Its targets are significant: between 10,000 and 50,000 direct digital jobs and between US$150 million and US$500 million in annual digital export revenues. These should be treated as ambitions, not achievements. Their credibility will depend on actual contracts secured, workers employed, productivity levels, retention rates, foreign-exchange earnings, and the ability of businesses operating from Enugu to compete internationally.

Inclusion will matter just as much. Women, people with disabilities, rural residents and young people from low-income households must not find themselves excluded by geography, cost, or entry requirements. And technical competence alone will not be enough. Communication, problem-solving, workplace ethics, financial capability, and foundational literacy remain indispensable to success in the global services economy.

Ultimately, the most important thing Enugu Talent City could build is not a campus.

It is a pathway.

From learning to work. From work to expertise. From expertise to enterprise. From local talent to global markets. And from public investment to sustainable private opportunity.

If Enugu succeeds in creating that pathway, the achievement will extend far beyond the physical boundaries of Talent City. It will demonstrate that some of the most important infrastructure a government can build is not made of concrete at all.

It is the invisible architecture that connects people, skills, markets, and opportunity.

That may prove to be Enugu Talent City’s most important lesson—and the one Nigeria’s other states should study most carefully.

•Dr Dakuku Peterside is the author of Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.

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