Beware the Mid-Atlantic

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 mon

Read More