We have won the investment pitch. Now comes the harder part

The Invest Lagos 3.0 Summit went beyond theoretical discussions. Real investment commitments were made. Partnerships were formed. Memoranda of Understanding were signed. The ambition in the room was visible, and the energy was genuine. By every measure that the organisers set for themselves, the summit delivered.

We watched closely. I want to say something that was not said loudly enough in any of the sessions at the summit.

The Lagos State Government targeted $2.5 billion in high-impact deals, spanning sustainable development, infrastructure financing, technology, energy, manufacturing, tourism, and urban development. Governors pitched. Investors listened. Pens moved across paper. The cameras captured the handshakes.

There is a question I did not hear asked, not once, not in any session, not in any corridor conversation that filtered back to me. It is the only question that will determine whether those signed documents become functioning enterprises or footnotes in a future report on deals that never fully materialised.

When the foreign capital arrives, who will manage the manufacturing plants in Imota? Who will lead the technology teams at the Lagos Free Zone? Who will build the talent pipelines that turn a signed MoU into a functioning, profitable, globally competitive enterprise? Where are the structural engineers, the middle managers, the process specialists, the operations leaders, and the technical workforce that every business at scale desperately and immediately needs the moment ground is broken?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is the central strategic challenge that Lagos and Nigeria more broadly have consistently underestimated at precisely the moment they can least afford to.

I have spent nearly two decades working with organisations to build and deploy human capital across Nigeria. Across sectors. Across regions. Across every type and size of enterprise. And the pattern I observe is so consistent, so persistent, so resistant to denial, that I feel an obligation to state it plainly: the single most common reason a promising enterprise underperforms or fails in this market is not just insufficient capital. It is not poor market timing. It is not regulatory friction, though those are real. It is the absence of a coherent, properly resourced, genuinely prioritised people strategy.

Capital without capable people is infrastructure waiting to decay. An MoU without a human capital plan is a photograph of an intention. And intentions, however well-funded, do not build factories, run hospitals, or scale technology platforms.

Building successfully and sustainably in Nigeria requires one thing above all others: people who are capable, well-led, continuously developed, and genuinely motivated to build something that endures. You cannot import that from China or France. You cannot outsource it indefinitely to expatriate management and assume the problem is solved. You cannot assume it will emerge organically from a labour market that has been chronically underinvested in. You have to build it here, deliberately, systematically, from the very beginning of the investment cycle, not as a remedial exercise once the gaps become painful.

This means that the investment conversation in Lagos cannot remain only about capital mobilisation. It must expand, urgently, to include the question of human capital mobilisation. The two are inseparable. Treating them sequentially, securing the funding first and worrying about the people later, is precisely the error that has turned so many promising investments into cautionary tales.

Every major investment project announced at Invest Lagos 3.0 must carry a human capital development plan. Not as a box to tick in a due diligence report. Not as a corporate social responsibility gesture appended to a business plan, but as a genuine condition of investment facilitation.

If an enterprise is receiving public infrastructure, fiscal incentives, land allocation, or government facilitation from Lagos State to build a factory, a hospital, a data centre, a logistics hub, or a technology park, it should be required to demonstrate, clearly, credibly, and with measurable commitments, how it will source, develop, and retain the workforce that will actually run the operation. Which institutions will supply the technical talent? What training infrastructure will be built? How will middle management be developed over five years? What is the retention strategy in a market where skilled talent is increasingly mobile and increasingly aware of its own value?

These are not soft questions. They are the operational questions on which the return on every dollar of that $2.5 billion ultimately depends.

There is something important to acknowledge here. Lagos is not without assets on this front. The city has a large, young, ambitious, and increasingly educated population. It has a growing ecosystem of private sector training institutions, professional development organisations, and university partnerships that are producing graduates across disciplines. It has entrepreneurs and operators who have built real businesses under genuinely difficult conditions and developed, in the process, a quality of practical resilience and adaptability that is itself a form of human capital.

The raw material is here. What is missing is the architecture, the deliberate, policy-backed, investor-required framework that connects available talent to arriving capital in a structured, sustainable way. What is missing is the insistence, at the highest levels of investment facilitation, that human capital strategy is not optional, is not secondary, and is not someone else’s problem to solve after the deal is done.

About the writer:

Deborah Yemi-Oladayo is the managing director of Proten International, a leading HR consulting firm in Nigeria, specialising in talent acquisition, employee outsourcing, learning and development, and HR advisory services. Email: [email protected]