The Great African Tech Exodus: Why Your Best Employees Are Tomorrow’s Biggest Competitors

When Tosin Eniolorunda walked out of Interswitch’s Lagos office for the last time in 2015, he carried with him just ₦15 million in savings and a burning conviction that he could build something better. Fast forward to 2024, and that “something better”, Moniepoint, is now worth over $1 billion, making it Africa’s newest unicorn. But here’s the kicker: Eniolorunda isn’t alone.

Welcome to Africa’s most expensive corporate hemorrhage – the relentless exodus of top talent from established tech giants to create their own billion-dollar empires. It’s a phenomenon so systematic, so predictable, and so profitable that it’s spawned its own terminology: the “Paystack Mafia,” the “Interswitch Mafia,” and a growing army of employee-turned-competitor stories that should keep every African tech CEO awake at night.

The Billion-Dollar Brain Drain

The numbers are staggering. In 2024, Africa minted two new unicorns, Moniepoint and Tyme, bringing the total number of startups valued above US $1bn to nine. What’s remarkable isn’t just the growth, but the pattern. Nearly every major African tech success story can trace its DNA back to an ex-employee who got fed up with the status quo and decided to fix it themselves.

Moniepoint CEO, Tosin Eniolorunda, told Techpoint Africa in 2018 that he left Interswitch with ₦15 million in savings to build Moniepoint, now worth $1 billion. Eniolorunda’s story is no longer unique and it’s quickly becoming the blueprint for African tech entrepreneurship.

The Paystack Phenomenon: When Alumni Become Competitors

A club of startup founders scoring millions of dollars in valuation and dominating headlines in the tech world are alumni of the fintech company Paystack. The so-called “Paystack Mafia” reads like a who’s who of Nigerian tech royalty, and their success stories are both inspiring and terrifying for incumbent players.

Take Femi Aluko, whose journey perfectly encapsulates this trend. Aluko joined Paystack in December 2017 as the company’s fifth engineer. He was the company’s core payment engineer, who built the payment infrastructure for the multiple payment methods used by thousands of Paystack customers today. During a team trip to Dubai in 2021, Aluko got the idea to create a reliable food delivery startup in Nigeria. Armed with 4 years’ experience at Paystack solving complex payment problems, Aluko, who was at the time a backend principal engineer, decided he was ready to take on another challenge. This led to the birth of Chowdeck, an on-demand food delivery startup.

Chowdeck is more than just another food delivery app; it’s also a testament to how deep institutional knowledge, combined with entrepreneurial ambition, can create entirely new market categories. With its new acquisition, whose value has not yet been disclosed, Chowdeck is no longer just a delivery company. The company is expanding beyond delivery into fintech, leveraging Aluko’s payments expertise gained at Paystack.

The Interswitch Exodus: A Masterclass in Talent Leakage

Known for its pioneering status in online payments in Nigeria, Interswitch has also been a breeding ground for some of the country’s startups. The Interswitch story is perhaps even more dramatic than Paystack’s. We anre talking about one or two ambitious employees either. The systematic and albeit dramatic talent hemorrhaging that has essentially created an entire generation of competitors.

Here are the standout stories that should give every tech CEO nightmares:

Tosin Eniolorunda & Felix Ike – Moniepoint (Now worth $1+ billion) Eniolorunda spent five years at Interswitch across two spells before leaving to start Moniepoint in 2015. His co-founder and CTO Felix Ike also came from Interswitch, where he spent 20 months as a software developer. Together, they built what started as TeamApt into Nigeria’s newest unicorn, serving 98% of commercial banks in the country by 2016.

Charles Ifedi – eBanqo Perhaps the most painful departure of all: Charles Ifedi was one of the three co-founders at Interswitch and only left in 2018 to begin eBanqo. A co-founder leaving to start a competing business? That’s not just talent drain – that’s existential crisis territory.

Ope Adeoye – OnePipe Adeoye spent more than a decade at Interswitch across two spells, gaining deep expertise in consumer and mobile services. He then founded OnePipe, an embedded finance startup that has raised more than $8 million and is now building the infrastructure that competes with his former employer’s core business.

Tosin Osibodu – Chaka After spending five months as a data engineer at Interswitch in 2009, Osibodu went on to build Chaka, which became the first Nigerian fintech to get the Securities and Exchange Commission’s digital stock trading licence. The company was eventually acquired by Risevest in 2023.

Adetokunbo Omotosho – Cybervergent Omotosho joined Interswitch in 2004 on a short-term contract but ended up spending eight years there, eventually leading the IT infrastructure department. He then founded Cybervergent, a cybersecurity company that now has clients on three continents and more than 50 employees.

The list continues with Edward Popoola (Cowrywise), Bashir Aminu (Payourse), Celestine Ezeokoye (WeMove), Chinedu Ossai (Revwit), and Liyi Victor (Gladefinance) – each taking specific domain expertise gained at Interswitch to build competing or adjacent businesses.

The pattern is so consistent it’s almost formulaic: brilliant engineer joins established company, gains deep industry insights, identifies persistent customer pain points, gets frustrated with internal bureaucracy, leaves to solve the problem independently, and eventually builds a company that competes directly with their former employer.

Why This Keeps Happening: The Four Horsemen of Employee Exodus

1. The Innovation Bottleneck

Large organizations, by their very nature, become risk-averse. Employees with game-changing ideas often find themselves trapped in endless approval cycles, committee reviews, and corporate politics. When you’re sitting on a solution that could transform an entire market, bureaucratic inertia becomes unbearable.

2. The Recognition Gap

Many of these future founders weren’t just employees but were the architects of their former companies’ most successful products. Yet corporate structures often fail to adequately recognize or compensate the individuals who drive breakthrough innovations. When you build a billion-dollar payment infrastructure but see only a modest salary increase, entrepreneurship starts looking very attractive.

3. The Vision Mismatch

Established companies often have entrenched strategies and established markets. Visionary employees who see opportunities in adjacent or entirely new markets find their ideas consistently deprioritized. The only way to pursue their vision becomes to pursue it independently.

4. The Knowledge Arbitrage

By the time an employee decides to leave, they’ve essentially completed an expensive MBA program funded by their employer. They understand the market intimately, know exactly what customers want, have identified all the operational inefficiencies, and possess the technical skills to execute. They end up not just leaving but practically graduating.

The Global Parallel: Silicon Valley’s Expensive Lessons

This phenomenon isn’t uniquely African. Silicon Valley has been grappling with the “founder factory” problem for decades. PayPal famously spawned the “PayPal Mafia,” including Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Peter Thiel (Palantir), and Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn). Google has produced founders across dozens of major companies. Facebook’s alumni have created everything from Instagram (acquired by Facebook) to Asana.

What makes the African version particularly potent is the combination of rapidly growing markets, limited established players, and a generation of exceptionally talented individuals who’ve gained world-class experience but see massive untapped opportunities.

The Prediction: This Will Happen Again (And Again)

Looking at the current landscape, we can predict with near certainty that this pattern will continue. Three of these unicorns are from Africa’s most populous country and also its biggest economy— Nigeria—while the other one, Fawry, is from Egypt, where tech startups are attracting VC funding. The fintech leaders primarily emerge from Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa, nations recognized for having the continent’s most developed and well-funded technology ecosystems.

Every major African tech company is currently incubating its future competitors. The employees working on your most critical projects today could be your biggest rivals tomorrow. The question isn’t whether this will happen – it’s which of your employees will be the next to achieve unicorn status.

The Cost of Ignoring Internal Innovation

The financial implications are staggering. When Paystack was acquired by Stripe for $200 million, it represented not just a success story, but also highlighted the massive opportunity cost for companies that failed to nurture similar innovations internally. When Moniepoint achieved its billion-dollar valuation, Interswitch essentially watched a former employee create a company worth more than their own market capitalization.

The Solution: From Talent Drain to Talent Retention

So what can African tech leaders do to stop this expensive exodus? The answer isn’t to prevent employees from leaving; that’s both impossible and counterproductive. Instead, it’s about creating internal environments where breakthrough innovations can flourish.

Listen Louder: That employee who keeps proposing a “crazy” new product direction might be onto something worth billions. Create formal channels for innovation, not just suggestion boxes.

Invest in Internal Ventures: Consider creating internal venture arms where promising ideas can be developed with proper funding and autonomy, while keeping the talent in-house.

Equity Participation: If an employee’s idea generates significant value, they should participate in that value creation meaningfully. Stock options and profit-sharing aren’t just compensation but should be used as the retention tools they are.

Intrapreneurship Programs: Create pathways for employees to act like entrepreneurs within your organization. Give them resources, remove bureaucratic barriers, and let them build.

Partnership Over Competition: When an employee has a genuinely disruptive idea that doesn’t fit your core business, consider partnering with them rather than losing them entirely. Strategic investments and partnerships can turn potential competitors into allies.

The Future of African Tech is Collaboration Over Competition

The most successful African tech ecosystem won’t be one where companies hoard talent, but where they actively cultivate it and create win-win scenarios for both organizations and individuals. The goal isn’t to prevent the next Moniepoint or Chowdeck, it’s to ensure that when these breakthrough companies emerge, they’re partners rather than competitors.

As Africa’s tech scene continues to mature, the companies that thrive will be those that recognize a fundamental truth: your employees’ biggest ideas aren’t threats to be suppressed but opportunities to be embraced. The choice is simple: evolve your approach to internal innovation, or watch your best talent build billion-dollar companies that make your current business model obsolete.

After all, if someone in your organization keeps highlighting a customer pain point or service gap, maybe, just maybe, they’re not being difficult. Maybe they’re being visionary. And maybe, instead of watching them walk out the door with that vision, it’s time to listen.

The next African unicorn is probably sitting in someone’s office right now, frustrated that their brilliant idea keeps getting shot down. The question is: will that someone be your company, or your competitor’s?