About 5.5 million Nigerians have become unemployed in the past two years of the current administration, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics have revealed.
According to the latest unemployment report released by NBS, 351,015 Nigerians became unemployed in the last quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of unemployed and underemployed persons to 28.58 million.
As at August 2016, 4.58 million Nigerians had become unemployed since the President Muhammadu Buhari administration took power.
The figure increased in the third quarter of 2016 to 5,134,913 as unemployment rate spiked to 13.9 percent.
But according to the latest NBS report, “In Q4 2016, the labour force population increased to 81.15 million from 80.67 million in Q3 2016, representing an increase of 0.6% in the labour force during the quarter”. The term ‘labour force’ refers to people within the working age population willing, able and actively looking for work.
“This means about 482,689 persons from the economically active population entered the labour force during the quarter.
“During the reference period, the number of unemployed in the labour force, increased by 351,015persons, resulting in an increase in the national unemployment rate to 14.2% in Q4 2016, slightly up from 13.9% in Q3,13.3% in Q2, 12.1% in Q1 2016, and 10.4% in Q4 2015″.
The Buhari administration promised to create millions of job in 2016, but NBS figures show that the jobs created could not match the fresh entrants of the labour market.
It is worthy of note that 27.44 million persons within the economically active or working age population decided not to work for one reason or the other in Q4 2016.
There were a total of 28.58 million persons in the Nigerian labour force in Q4 2016, that were either unemployed or underemployed compared to compared to 27.12million in Q3, 26.06million in Q2 and 24.5 million in Q1 2016.
