Nigeria’s unemployment rate increased to 33.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020 from 27.1 per cent recorded in first quarter of the same year, according to the latest unemployment data (Q4’20) obtained from the website of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) yesterday.
According to the unemployment report, it was gathered 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 its definition in Nigeria. Given the latest unemployment rate, Nigeria ranked 11.7 per cent.
Comparing the rate globally, out of the 181 countries with rates published within the last two years, Nigeria currently ranked 41 with the highest unemployment rate. Countries with highest unemployment rates presently, according to NBS’ findings, are Bosnia and Herzegovinian (34.3%),
Namibia (33.4%), and Angola (32.0%), while those with the lowest rates are Qatar (0.1%), Belarus (0.2%), Niger (0.3%) and Laos (0.6%). Nigeria, NBS said, experienced decrease in under-employment rate from 28.6 per cent to 22.8 per cent in the reference quarter.
The agency said it drew its findings from responses and interviews conducted across the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja. It said a total number of 31,145 interviews were completed out of the initial sample of 33,300, giving a response rate of 93.53 per cent at the end of the survey.
The NBS added: “During the reference period, the computed national unemployment rate rose from 27.1 per cent in Q2’20 to 33.3 per cent in Q4’20, while the underemployment rate decreased from 28.6 per cent to 22.8 per cent.
“A combination of both the unemployment and under-employment 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 Q2’20. Using the international definition of unemployment, the rate was computed to be 17.5 per cent.”
While using aggregation of labour force, the report noted that the number of persons in the labour force (i.e., people within ages 15 -64, who are able and willing to work) was estimated to be 69,675,468.
This, it said, was 13.22 per cent less than the number of persons in Q2’20. Of this number, those within the age bracket of 25 to 34 were highest, with 20,091,695 or 28.34 per cent of the labour force.