BY MAYOWA SAMUEL
The Federal Government has said that it plans to change the pattern in which the National Bureau of Statistics calculates and arrives at Nigeria’s unemployment figures.
Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammudu Buhari on Public Affairs, Ajuri Ngelale, disclosed this on Monday during a TV program.
Ngelale stated that the government frowned at the 23.1 million unemployment figure for the country, which represented 33.3 per cent unemployment rate disclosed by the NBS in December 2021, noting that most hardworking youths in Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, shops, markets were not being captured as employed, necessitating the need for the change.
He said, “The move to capture everyone into the employment statistics is not to make the Buhari look good but it is about ensuring that the country has accurate data to precisely adjust economic actions in terms of economic development plans.
“What we have today, and the Corporation Affairs Commission has been quite forthcoming about it. They misinformed Nigerians, look, there are 40 million informal MSME in Nigeria that are not registered with the CAC.
“So, you go to markets across the country, you will see people doing business having their aid, a boy or a girl, they are paying salaries to this people, and they are also paying their own salary. But the way they are currently tabulated in the country today by the NBS is that they are unemployed and having zero income which means they are under the poverty line.
“When the world bank, the International Monetary Fund and some of these development banks want our population data they base their figures on NBS data and the mistake continues and this shows the very serious problems we have.
“Imagine in 2015, we had 8 percent unemployment figures, which is about the 140-150 million of the working population. Are you saying only 12 million are unemployed? Accurate data is a problem. While we understand that the unemployment problem we have in the country, is gripping, we are assessing these issues.
“But we also recognised, where we have a bifurcated situation, in which in one hand when it comes to population related data, despite the fact there is no census in recent years, we have real issues about factoring in the informal sector in our unemployment statistics as a country and that is a fact and we have talked about this openly.”
Recall that the NBS in collaboration with World Bank had in another report recently, revealed that 20 per cent of Nigerians employed at the start of 2020 lost their jobs following the outbreak of COVID-19.
However, contrary to the NBS’s unemployment figure, the Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo through his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Laolu Akande revealed that the government’s Economic Sustainability Plan, had saved over one million jobs and prevented the closure of over 150,000 small businesses that would have been affected by the pandemic.
