Hiring help from Nigeria

I know, I know, why would I do it. I’ll be brief, because I have a lot to do. Regarding, why would I do it? You have to take a chance to get lucky. Let’s dive in.

At work, there’s a dude, who is Nigerian/British. I also got naturalized, so naturally there’s a connection there. He became agitated with this idea of starting a business. In fact, let me show you. As you can see, he did just about everything wrong. Set up the business address as his home (when I told him, he said he doesn’t live there anymore, so I guess all is well now), issued one share (which means that if he wants to invite someone in, it’s gonna be a headache), and last but not least, didn’t bother filling his accounts. Needless to say, his company got dissolved via compulsory strike-off. He wants to reopen it and this time, he will definitely trade with it. Anyway, this post is not about GENESIS CLEANING AND SECURITY SERVICES LTD, so let’s move on.

He was saying how people in Nigeria beg for work for £20/month. I looked it up, and found out, that Nigerian government launched a platform, akin to Fiverr, that supposedly helps Nigerian youth find work on-line. It’s called Nigerian Youth Academy gigs. It was launched in December 2025! I didn’t wait for anything anymore and posted an ad. It was 208th ad on the site. I thought that all the users will see my ad and therefore engagement is just a matter of time. Oh boy, was I wrong.

I couldn’t see the ad when I wasn’t logged in, so I submitted a ticket and lo and behold, few short days later, my account got deleted with no warning, no explanation, no anything. Clearly, I wasn’t wanted on the platform, but it would be useful to know why, so I don’t think it’s a mistake a don’t try a new account. I can only care so much about a broken government website, so I just asked an LLM, why this happened. To my great surprise, Gemini said it’s because it’s meant for Nigerians only. Which doesn’t make any sense to me, why would you not want to attract foreign employers? Also, Gemini could have told me that as a foreigner this is a waste of time, if that’s the truth, but LLMs were not invented to tell you the truth and even to be useful. So there’s that.

At any rate, any small scale entrepreneur, beware. Sometimes foreigners are not welcome. All the best.

If you’re interested in whether I hired some help in the end or not and how, you’re gonna have to wait for the next installment in the series.