Dear Landlord: Your Rent Is Not a Bill. It Is a Death Sentence.

My Thoughts Have No Filter By Abdul’Azeez Bello

WhatsApp: 0805 113 0075 | omobolajibello@gmail.com

The Most Exploitative Person in Nigeria Is Your Landlord.

You think I am exaggerating. Give me five minutes.

Your landlord will take your money every year, increase it every renewal, add agency fee on top, add legal fee on top of that, collect two years in advance before you even move in, and then look you in the face with the confidence of a man who knows you have nowhere else to go.

And somehow, we have decided that this is normal.

The rent-to-income ratio in major Nigerian cities has surged to 60 to 70 percent, more than double the 30 percent recommended by housing experts.

Let that number enter your body slowly. Sixty to seventy percent of what you earn every month is going to your landlord. Before food. Before school fees. Before transport. Before that small enjoyment you promised yourself after a hard week of work. Your landlord has already collected the majority of your salary and he did not go to work a single day to earn it.

Enikéni tí ó bá je ohun tí kì í se tirè yóò san án padà ní ojó kan. He who eats what is not his will one day pay it back. But in Nigeria, the landlord is eating and eating and nobody is sending the bill back to him.

Not yet. But this piece is a start.

The Numbers That Should Make Every Landlord Lose Sleep

Rents for residential accommodation have jumped by 40 to 60 percent across various neighbourhoods in major Nigerian cities. And that is the conservative estimate.

In some districts, rents have increased by between 40 and 120 percent over the past two years. A two-bedroom apartment that previously rented for about one million two hundred thousand naira was reported to cost as much as two million five hundred thousand naira annually.

More than double. In two years. For the same four walls. The same leaking ceiling. That same water heater that throws chilled water at you every cold morning, that the landlord says he will fix but has not touched since the last administration. Same house. Double the price. Zero improvements.

Nigeria’s housing deficit stands at between 14.9 million and 15.2 million units as of early 2026. Nearly fifteen million homes that do not exist but should. And into that vacuum of shortage, the landlord has inserted himself as judge, jury and executioner of your monthly budget.

Two Years in Advance. Let That Insult Land Properly.

The two-year rent advance demand common in cities like Lagos and Abuja forces tenants to seek high-interest personal loans just to secure a roof.

Two years in advance. Before you sleep one night in the house. Before you know if the borehole works. Before you find out that the ceiling fan in the master bedroom has been broken since 2020 and the landlord knew but said nothing. Before you discover that the neighbours on the left play music until 3am and the landlord’s response is that is not my concern.

You must pay two full years upfront.

A civil servant earning a reasonable monthly salary is looking at a two-bedroom apartment asking for one and a half million naira per year. Two years advance means three million naira on the table before the keys change hands. Three million naira that this civil servant does not have, has never had in one place at one time, and must now borrow at painful interest rates from a cooperative or a loan app or a family member who is also struggling to pay their own rent.

And the landlord? He is in his village buying land with your three million naira while you are in Lagos trying to figure out how to eat for the rest of the month. The audacity is not just impressive. It is a spiritual gift.

The Estate Agent Joined the Party. Now It Is a Full Carnival.

Just when you thought paying two years advance was enough suffering, enter the estate agent.

Ten percent of one year’s rent as agency fee. Legal fee. Agreement fee. Caution deposit. Service charge. Inspection fee. And sometimes, if the agent is feeling particularly creative, a fee that has no name but must be paid if you want the landlord to even consider your application.

Many tenants are grappling with sharp rent increases, multiple agency and legal fees, caution deposits, and service charges that now consume a significant share of household income.

By the time you have paid everything required to move into a house in Lagos or Abuja, you have paid for the house. Not rented it. Almost bought it. And yet you own nothing. The landlord still owns everything. And in twelve months he will look at you with fresh eyes and announce another increase because cement prices went up.

Which brings me to the favourite defence of every Nigerian landlord everywhere.

“The economy is hard. Building materials are expensive”.

Yes. The economy is hard. For everybody. Including the tenant who is also paying more for food, more for transport, more for school fees, more for medical care, all at the same time you are increasing the rent. The economy being hard is not an exclusive experience that only the landlord is having. The tenant is also inside the same hard economy. The difference is that the landlord owns the house and the tenant owns only the problem of paying for it.

Humanity Has Left the Building. Along With the Affordable Rent.

A civil servant described the rental situation as alarming, saying a house that used to rent for three hundred thousand naira now goes for over one million naira.

More than three times the price. Same house. Same location. Same landlord who used to greet you warmly but now communicates exclusively through a notice pasted on the gate.

There is a particular kind of Nigerian landlord that I want to address directly right now. The one who lives abroad. Who bought that house in Nigeria with money earned in pounds or euros or dollars. Who has never once lived in that neighbourhood, never experienced the daily hardship of the people renting from him, and who sends rent increase notices via WhatsApp message from somewhere in the United Kingdom while his tenants are selling their belongings to gather the money.

This person has completely disconnected the act of collecting rent from the human beings paying it. To him, it is passive income. To the tenant, it is a monthly crisis.

Aláàkàárò kì í mo iròlé ará elòmíràn. The person who goes to bed comfortably does not know how the suffering person spends their night.

But the suffering person is very much awake. Calculating. Borrowing. Cutting elsewhere to manage here. And wondering how much longer this can continue before something gives.

What the Government Has Been Doing About This

Allow me a moment of pure, unfiltered sarcasm.

The National Housing Fund, the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, and state-led initiatives like Lagos’ Rent-to-Own scheme were conceived to help ordinary Nigerians own homes. Yet they have been hobbled by bureaucracy, weak enforcement, corruption and low public confidence. Few workers even understand how to access their own contributions, while many developers avoid formal channels altogether.

So the government created programmes to help people afford housing. Then made those programmes so complicated, so slow, so bureaucratic and so corruption-riddled that the ordinary Nigerian cannot access them.

The programmes meant for the poor ended up helping people who were not quite poor enough to desperately need them. The desperately poor ones are still in the queue. Still filling forms. Still being told to come back next week. Meanwhile rents keep rising and the queue is longer than the queue to buy petrol in 2022.

In Lagos and Abuja, the twin epicentres of the housing crisis, the absence of effective rent control laws has allowed arbitrary increases to become the norm. No rent control. No cap. No regulation. Just a landlord, a piece of paper and the confidence that you have no choice but to sign.

The Way Forward

The rent crisis in Nigeria is not just a housing problem. It is a human dignity problem. And it requires action from multiple directions at the same time.

Enact and enforce rent control laws across all states.

Lagos has a Tenancy Law that theoretically limits how much rent can be increased and how much advance can be demanded. The problem is that very few tenants know it exists and very few landlords respect it. Every state must have clear, enforceable rent control legislation. Landlords who violate it must face real consequences, not a warning letter that nobody follows up on.

Abolish the two-year advance system.

One year advance is already painful. Two years advance is exploitation dressed in a tenancy agreement. The law must cap rent advance at a maximum of six months and make it illegal to demand more. This one change alone would reduce the desperation and debt that Nigerian tenants carry into every new accommodation.

Regulate estate agents seriously.

Agency fees in Nigeria are unregulated, inconsistent and often outright fraudulent. A clear national framework for estate agent fees, published publicly and enforced by a body with real power, would immediately reduce the total cost burden on tenants who are already stretched beyond reason.

Fix the Federal Mortgage Bank so it actually works for ordinary Nigerians.

A mortgage system that the average Nigerian cannot access is not a mortgage system. It is a press release. The FMBN must be reformed with urgency, its processes simplified, and its loan disbursement volumes increased to numbers that actually make a dent in the fifteen million unit deficit.

Nigerian landlords must find their humanity again.

You are not just a property owner. You are someone’s neighbour in this country. The person paying your rent is a teacher, a nurse, a trader, a civil servant who is already fighting on every other front. Raising rent by 100 percent in one year is not business. It is cruelty. You can make a return on your property without breaking the people paying for it.

The Verdict

Ilé ni ipilè gbogbo ohun tó dára. The home is the foundation of everything good.

But when the home becomes the source of the greatest suffering in a person’s life, something has gone terribly wrong.

Nigeria’s tenants are not asking for free housing. They are asking for housing that does not require them to borrow money at painful interest rates, sell their assets, skip meals and live in permanent financial anxiety just to have a roof over their head.

At some point, the tenant runs out of places to cut. At some point, the calculation stops working. At some point, the family that was managing begins to collapse under the weight of what they are being asked to carry.

Dear landlord. Your tenants are human beings. They are not ATMs. They are not cash flow projections on a spreadsheet. They are people with children, with dreams, with bills of their own and with limits that your rent increases are rapidly approaching.

Show some humanity. Not for their sake alone.

For the sake of the country you both live in. Because a nation of homeless, financially broken, dignity-stripped tenants is not a foundation that any landlord’s property portfolio can ultimately stand on.

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Abdul’Azeez Bello writes from the streets of Nigeria, where the truth is always louder than the headlines.

My Thoughts Have No Filter.