What Nigeria’s middle class in psychological transit is costing the economy — and why the bill never appears in the migration statistics
I am currently recruiting, which means I am spending hours interviewing talented Nigerians in their thirties and early forties. They are ambitious, well educated, experienced — exactly the sort of people any economy should want to keep. Yet one common feature worries me.
Too many are in transit. Not physically. Mentally.
Almost every conversation contains some variation of the same sentence: “we might be relocating.” They speak about Nigeria almost as though they are already visitors — polite, engaged, and quietly elsewhere.
This is not simply my impression. According to the latest Afrobarometer survey, 56 per cent of Nigerians have considered leaving the country, up from 36 per cent in 2017. More striking still, the proportion who have given emigration a lot of thought has tripled in seven years, from 11 per cent to 33 per cent. Migration is no longer an event. It has become a mindset.
And a mindset, unlike a departure, never shows up at the airport. That is precisely why it deserves more attention than it gets.
The Mid-Atlantic
By way of background, I grew up in London in the 1970s, when Nigeria was the place to be. The irony is that Nigerians in London were themselves living in transit — looking longingly not towards Britain but towards what was called ‘home’. Nigeria was always just around the corner; it was bigger, better, imminent. Many of them lived in what I have since come to call the mid-Atlantic: one leg in each country, fully resident in neither. It is a dangerous place to live.
I have uncles who refused to buy property in the 1960s because, as they repeatedly explained, “We’re going back to Nigeria soon.” When they died in their eighties, they were still tenants in London.
I tell that story not to criticise them. They acted according to what they genuinely believed, and life simply unfolded differently. But their story illustrates something economists rarely measure, because it never generates a transaction to record.
Waiting has a cost. Not just for individuals. For countries.
The years passed. Children grew up; grandchildren arrived. Many belatedly realised that the temporary arrangement had quietly become permanent. They did not lose money. They lost decades of compounding. Promotions were not pursued, houses were never bought, pensions never accumulated. Waiting generated no visible loss, only invisible opportunity costs—and those proved enormous.
I sometimes wonder whether today’s Nigerian middle class risks making the same mistake in reverse.
Migration Does Not Begin at the Airport
Nigeria’s middle class has quietly become a transit lounge. Not everyone will leave. Most, statistically, will not. But many have already stopped imagining their future here — and that distinction matters more than we realise.
Migration does not begin at the airport. It begins much earlier. It begins the day someone decides not to renovate the house because they hope to sell it. The day they postpone opening a business because they may not be around to run it.
None of those decisions is visible. No form is filled. No statistic moves. But each one is a small withdrawal of belief from the national account — and belief, it turns out, is the collateral the whole economy borrows against.
Investment Is Confidence Made Visible
We economists tend to discuss investment as though it were determined by interest rates, taxation and regulation. Those things matter enormously — I have spent much of this diary series on exactly those levers. But investment is also, and always, an act of optimism about a specific place over a specific horizon.
I learned this in London’s financial markets before I ever sat in a Nigerian ministry. One question asked of any investment is the exit: how do we get out, and when? It is a perfectly sensible question for a fund. It is a fatal question for a citizen. A portfolio can be assembled by people planning their departure. A country cannot.
Every business opened says: I expect to be here. Every factory says: I believe this market has a future. Investment is confidence made visible. The opposite is equally true. Once people begin living psychologically elsewhere, their financial behaviour changes long before their passports do.
And here is the part that should interest every policymaker: the spending does not stop. Its destination changes. Instead of capitalising a business, the household buys dollars. Instead of acquiring a second shop, it pays immigration consultants and examination fees. Instead of a pension contribution, a proof-of-funds account. The money still exists. It simply no longer believes in Nigeria.
The money still exists. It simply no longer believes in Nigeria.
In Ministries, we tracked the capital flight of corporations with great sophistication — the transfer pricing, the dividend repatriation, the offshore structures. But the foreign exchange returns were quietly telling another story in the lines nobody debated: school fees paid abroad, medical bills settled abroad, balances parked abroad to satisfy someone else’s immigration officer. Each entry was a household re-domiciling its future. The capital flight of families never made it into a single policy memo. It should have.
Readers of this diary will recognise where that leads. I have written before about why Nigeria’s interest rates are the price of a shallow savings pool — money that never pauses long enough to become the raw material of cheap credit. Psychological transit is one more pump driving that velocity. A household saving in dollars under the mattress, or parking funds abroad to fund an exit plan , has left the domestic savings pool as surely as if it had emigrated. The person stays; the capital has already left. We debate the japa of people. The japa of balance sheets is quieter and, I suspect, larger.
The Statistics We Do Not Collect
This is where I think our national conversation may have become too narrow. We spend enormous time debating the number of people who leave. Far less attention is paid to the millions who stay but quietly postpone their lives.
Every delayed business, abandoned renovation or cancelled expansion represents employment and investment that never materialised. None appears in migration statistics because there is no census of decisions never taken. Yet collectively these invisible choices may cost the economy more than the departures we count.
When a Society Becomes Temporary
Of course, the individual decisions are entirely understandable. Parents want security. Professionals want stable careers. Businesses need predictable policy. Nobody should be criticised for trying to provide the best possible future for their family — I am the child of people who made exactly that calculation, in the other direction, fifty years ago.
Individually rational decisions, however, can aggregate into collective consequences nobody chose. When enough educated professionals begin behaving as temporary residents, society itself becomes more temporary. Communities weaken. Professional associations lose their experienced members. Schools struggle to retain governors; charities lose volunteers. Businesses shorten their planning horizons. Politics becomes more transactional, because fewer people believe they will live with the consequences twenty years from now — and a citizen who does not expect to be here for the consequences is a citizen with less reason to demand better ones.
Perhaps the greatest casualty is confidence itself, because confidence is contagious — and so is uncertainty. When everyone around you is discussing emigration, staying begins to feel like the eccentric decision, the one requiring explanation.
Children absorb it too. Increasingly they speak not of which Nigerian university they hope to attend, but of which country they hope eventually to live in. Schools advertise Canadian pathways, British pathways and American pathways as proudly as they once advertised examination results. The assumption is subtle but powerful: success increasingly has another postcode.
What the Task Actually Is
Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. Migration is not wrong. Countries have always benefited from the movement of people and ideas, and Nigeria’s diaspora remains one of our greatest strengths — its remittances, its networks, its proof that Nigerian talent competes anywhere. The concern is different. It is what happens when an entire generation begins to believe that its real life will start somewhere else.
Nigeria rightly celebrates record remittance inflows, yet remittances are largely consumption finance. As one who is old enough to remember parents sending money home when naira and pound looked each other in the eye, at one to one, I understand that flow but they rarely substitute for the factories, businesses and long-term domestic investment.
Economies are built by people who expect to remain long enough to enjoy the returns on today’s sacrifices. Factories, pensions, plantations and family businesses all require patience. Patience requires permanence — or at least the credible expectation of it. It requires believing that the future you are investing in is your own.
So the challenge before us is not to persuade Nigerians to stay. That would be far too simplistic, and it would deserve to fail. Exhortation does not compete with a visa. The real task is to build a country that is worth planning a future in: one where buying a home feels sensible, where planting trees feels worthwhile and where young professionals imagine their children growing up nearby rather than thousands of miles away. Every structural reform this diary has argued for — reliable power, credit that reaches the small business, a savings pool deep enough to reward patience — is, in the end, an argument for permanence. People do not commit to a place because they are asked to. They commit because the arithmetic of commitment finally works.
As I continue interviewing, I am struck by how capable these candidates are. Nigeria is not short of talent. What worries me is how much of that talent has mentally checked out before it has physically departed.
We have become so accustomed to discussing japa that we focus on those who board the aircraft. I am increasingly interested in those who never do — who stay in Nigeria but are psychologically already somewhere else, postponing decisions, deferring investments and delaying commitments in anticipation of another life.
The greatest cost of living in transit is not the plane ticket. It is the businesses never started, the homes never bought, the communities never strengthened and the confidence quietly withdrawn while waiting to board. Economies rarely collapse because everyone leaves. They weaken because too many people stop believing they have a future where they are.
. Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.