BREAKING: Over 23 million Nigerians without job as unemployment rate hits 33.3%

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), on Monday, revealed in its latest figure that the Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose from 27.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2020 to 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020.

The NBS disclosed in its report on ‘Labour force Statistics: Unemployment and underemployment report- Abridged labour force survey under COVID-19 (Q4, 2020) that this translates to 23.19 million unemployed people.

The report is read in part, “During the reference period, the computed national unemployment rate rose from 27.1 per cent in Q2, 2020 to 33.3 per cent in Q4, 2020, while the underemployment rate decreased from 28.6 per cent to 22.8 per cent.

“A combination of both the unemployment and underemployment rate for the reference period gave a figure of 56.1 per cent.

“This means that 33.3 per cent of the labour force in Nigeria or 23,187,389 persons either did nothing or worked for less than 20 hours a week, making them unemployed by our definition in Nigeria.

“This is an additional 1,422,772 persons from the number in that category in Q2, 2020.

“Using the international definition of unemployment, the rate was computed to be 17.5 per cent.”

National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is the main National Agency responsible for the development and management of official statistics, the authoritative source and custodian of official statistics in Nigeria.

NBS came into being with the merger of the Federal Office of Statistics (FOS) and the National Data Bank (NDB). The creation was part of the implementation of the Statistical Master Plan (SMP), a programme document of the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN).

The merger was to give the agency a national outlook as the apex statistical agency for all the three tiers of Government.

Dr Yemi Kale is the Statistician General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer National Bureau of Statistics.