My Thoughts Have No Filter By Abdul’Azeez Bello
0805 113 0075 [WhatsApp Only] | omobolajibello@gmail.com
They Told Us the Middle Class Was the Backbone. Nobody Mentioned It Would Be Broken.
Once upon a time, in a Nigeria that feels more like a fairy tale every passing day, there existed a group of people called the middle class.
I remember them. Maybe you do too.
They had jobs. Real jobs. Jobs with salaries that could actually pay rent, feed a family and still leave something for a treat on Sunday. They drove modest cars that were not held together by faith and masking tape. They sent their children to decent schools. They had light, not because they owned a generator the size of a small aircraft, but because NEPA, bless its complicated soul, occasionally did its job.
That Nigeria? Gone. Carried away quietly, like a thief in the night, except the thief left receipts signed by every government since 1999.
So Who Exactly Was This Middle Class?
Let me be specific because Nigerians love to claim membership of a class they have long been evicted from.
The Nigerian middle class was the teacher who could afford a car and a mortgage. The civil servant whose salary arrived on time and actually meant something. The young banker, the small business owner, the lecturer, the engineer at a manufacturing company that actually manufactured things. The nurse who did not need to do four jobs to survive.
These were not rich people. They were not Lekki Phase 1 people. They were the people in between, the buffer between the wealthy and the desperately poor, the group that every serious economy depends on to keep moving.
I grew up watching these people. Some of them were my neighbours, my uncles, my teachers. Nigeria had them. Past tense. Emphasis on past.
The Inflation Did What the Government Could Not Be Bothered To Do
Let me tell you what I see around me every single day.
I see people who used to be comfortable now calculating whether they can afford both transport and lunch. I see market women shaking their heads at their own prices like they cannot believe what they are charging. I see young professionals with good jobs who still cannot make rent without borrowing.
Food prices have gone so high that eating three times a day has quietly become a luxury. A bag of rice that cost a manageable amount two years ago now requires a small loan and a serious conversation with God. Cooking gas became so expensive that some families returned to firewood in 2024 like it was 1974 and nobody in government found that embarrassing enough to address.
Transport costs doubled. Then doubled again. The average worker in Lagos is spending a chunk of their take home salary just getting to the place that pays them the take home salary. Someone in government should find that alarming. Nobody appears to.
Rent? I will not even go there. Landlords have been getting the same inflation memo as everyone else and have responded accordingly with figures that require a moment of silence before quoting.
The middle class did not vanish with a bang. They were squeezed. Slowly. Consistently. Methodically. Like a lemon that has been juiced, re-juiced, and then juiced one final desperate time just to be sure nothing is left.
The Naira Did the Rest of the Damage
If inflation was the slow poison, the naira collapse was the knockout.
I know people who earned what felt like decent naira salaries and watched those salaries become jokes in real time. A software developer whose monthly income suddenly converted to less than what a part time worker earns in an afternoon in London. A doctor with fifteen years of experience whose salary, in real purchasing terms, had shrunk so badly that the sacrifice no longer made sense.
So they left. Or they are planning to leave. Or they have a cousin who already left and is sending back stories that make staying feel like a choice only stubborn people make.
I do not blame them. I cannot.
Meanwhile, The Government Was Busy
Now to be fair, the government was not completely idle while all of this was happening.
They were busy sharing cars. Debating furniture budgets. Approving constituency projects that constituencies have never laid eyes on. Flying business class to conferences about poverty. Building the kind of personal houses on government salaries that should make any honest accountant weep quietly into their calculator.
The political class did not suffer through any of this. They did not feel the price of tomatoes. They do not know what diesel costs today because someone else handles that. They have not sat down to recalculate a grocery list because that is simply not their life.
It is almost impressive, honestly, the level of insulation from consequence that Nigerian public office provides its occupants.
The Private Sector Was Not Innocent Either
Before the private sector edges quietly towards the exit looking innocent, let me bring them back into the room.
Companies that should have been growing and hiring spent years in survival mode instead. Manufacturing declined. Multinationals quietly relocated to Ghana, to Egypt, to anywhere that felt less like doing business inside a controlled explosion.
The jobs that sustained the middle class started drying up. Retrenchment became a news item so regular that Nigerians began reading it the way they read obituaries. With sadness, yes, but with a resignation that said this is simply how things are now.
The tech boom that was supposed to save everyone turned out to have a very selective guest list. Not everyone got a ticket.
What Is Left of the Middle Class Today?
What is left is what economists call downward mobility and what ordinary Nigerians call just life now.
People who were comfortably middle class a decade ago are making choices today that would have been unthinkable back then. Choosing between school fees and a hospital bill. Moving children from private schools to government schools not as a statement but as a simple matter of arithmetic. Selling things. Borrowing. Relocating to cheaper areas. Eating less. Praying more. Complaining quietly so the neighbours do not hear.
The ones with globally sellable skills made the rational decision. They packed their laptops, their degrees and their years of experience and they moved. To Canada. To the UK. To anywhere that would receive them properly.
The ones who stayed are doing what Nigerians have always done. Finding ways. Hustling around every obstacle. Surviving in ways that should not be necessary for people who did absolutely everything right.
Does Anyone in Power Actually Care?
I ask myself this question more than I should have to.
Every government talks about the middle class the way Nigerians talk about NEPA. With affection, with hope, and with the deep unspoken understanding that nothing is really about to change. Policy papers get written. Committees get inaugurated. Speeches get delivered with tremendous conviction that evaporates somewhere between the podium and the actual policy table.
The middle class needed tax relief. They got more taxes. They needed affordable housing. They got housing policies written by people who have never once needed affordable housing. They needed a stable currency. They watched the naira become a case study that economics lecturers in other countries now use to teach what not to do.
At some point you have to stop asking whether the middle class is a priority and start accepting that it was always just a talking point for manifestos nobody rereads after election day.
The Way Forward
I am not just here to complain. I am here because I believe things can change if the right people start making the right decisions. So let me say clearly what I think needs to happen.
Fix the naira and mean it.
A stable currency is not a miracle. It is a policy choice. The Central Bank of Nigeria must pursue consistent, transparent monetary policy that protects the purchasing power of working Nigerians. Every time the naira bleeds, the middle class bleeds first and bleeds longest. Currency stability is not just an economic target. It is a survival issue for millions of ordinary people.
Tax the rich, relieve the worker.
The current tax structure punishes the salaried worker who has nowhere to hide while wealthy individuals and well connected corporations find every available loophole. A genuine review of Nigeria’s tax policy must shift the burden upward, protect low and middle income earners and close the gaps that allow the privileged few to pay less than the struggling many.
Bring back manufacturing and real jobs.
Nigeria cannot sustain a middle class on trading and importing alone. The government must create deliberate incentives for local manufacturing, reduce the cost of doing business and stop making it easier to import finished goods than to produce them at home. Every factory that opens is a collection of middle class salaries waiting to happen.
Make public services work for the people who pay for them.
The middle class funds this country through taxes and yet gets the least from the state in return. Public schools, public hospitals and public infrastructure must be invested in seriously, not as charity for the poor but as services that every Nigerian deserves regardless of their income. When public services work, private costs fall and the middle class breathes again.
Hold the political class accountable, starting now.
Every naira stolen from the public treasury is a salary that was never paid, a school that was never built and a business that was never started. Nigerians, especially professionals, civil society and the media, must demand consequences for corruption and incompetence at every level. Silence is complicity. Accountability is not optional if we want a different Nigeria.
The middle class did not build itself by accident. It was built by policy, by investment and by a government that once understood that the strength of a nation lives in the people between poverty and privilege. It can be rebuilt the same way. But it will require honesty, political will and leaders who actually feel the weight of what their decisions cost ordinary Nigerians.
The Verdict
The Nigerian middle class is not going extinct because Nigerians are lazy or unambitious. Go anywhere in the world where a Nigerian has been given a fair chance and watch what happens. They excel. They lead. They build things that matter.
The middle class is dying because the environment needed to keep it alive has been deliberately neglected by the very people whose salaries depend on it thriving.
You cannot grow a garden in acid soil and then act surprised when nothing survives.
The backbone that politicians love to mention in their speeches has not broken dramatically. It has been bent, compressed, underpaid, overtaxed, underserved and quietly worn down over decades.
And somewhere in Abuja right now, someone is probably commissioning a report on the importance of the middle class to Nigeria’s economic future.
The audacity, as always, is completely free.
Abdul’Azeez Bello is just a Nigerian who decided to write what he sees. Through ‘My Thoughts Have No Filter’, he says out loud what many think but never get to say. No big grammar. No hidden agenda. Just plain truth.