By Jude Idu, Cajethan Mmuta and Olusegun Olanrewaju
More Nigerians have weighed in on the rate of unemployment in the country, declaring that the situation has become increasingly hopeless.

The stakeholders, who spoke on Saturday, added that the unemployment position in the land had become significantly dangerous to the well-being of the citizens.

Their position is coming on the heels of a World Bank report that the country is experiencing its worst unemployment crisis in history.

The bank, in a research paper it conducted alongside the Korea World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF) and the Rapid Social Response (RSR) trust funds, said the country’s expanding working-age population together with scarce domestic employment opportunities was creating high rates of unemployment, particularly for her youths.

The challenges arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the research added, contributed to compounding the country’s unemployment records.

Indeed, the research stated that unemployment rate in the country rose five-fold in the last 10 years.

It said, “Between 2010 and 2020, the unemployment rate rose five-fold, from 6.4 per cent in 2010 to 33.3 per cent in 2020. The rise in unemployment rates has been particularly acute since the 2015-2016 economic recession and has further worsened as COVID-19 led to the worst recession in four decades in 2020.

“Since 2018, the active labour force population has dramatically decreased to around 70 million—lower than the level in 2014— while the number of Nigerians in the working-age population but not active in the labour force has increased from 29 million to 52 million between 2014 and 2020.

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“Similarly, Nigeria’s active labour force population, that is, those willing and able to work among the working-age population, grew from 73 million in 2014 to 90 million in 2018, adding 17.5 million new entrants to Nigeria’s active labour force.”

Hitherto, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), had, last March, declared that in the last quarter of 2020, the population of unemployed Nigerians stood at 33.3 per cent.

The figure, the bureau added represented an increase of 6.2 per cent points compared with the 27.1 per cent of quarter recorded in the second quarters of 2020.

The unemployment rate is defined nationally as the percentage of the labour force population who could not find at least 20 hours of work in the reference period, which the report said was significantly higher for youth (42.5 per cent) compared to non-youth (26.3 per cent).

However, weighing in on the development, a professor of Economics at the University of Lagos, Ndubisi Nwokoma, noted that the unemployment rate which stood at 33.3 per cent was “significantly dangerous to the well-being of the citizens”.

The economist explained, “Unemployment is measured when people are ready, able and willing to work, but do not find work. By the International Labour Organisation definition, a person is employed when they work at least 40 hours a week. The working age is regarded as between 15 and 60. Currently, 33.3 per cent or 23.2 million of the about 70 million people who should be working in Nigeria are out of work. This is high in all ramification.

The acceptable level of unemployment should between four and six per cent.
Noting that Nigerians who worked less than 20 hours a week stood at 22.8 per cent, the academic attributed the challenge to the parlous state of the economy.

The don declared, “One leading factor to the challenge is the critically poor state of the economy.The economy has not been in good shape for the past five years. It first went into a recession in 2016. In 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it plunged into another recession, its worst in four decades. It recorded gross domestic product contraction of 3.62 per cent in the third quarter of 2020.

“Again, there’s been a lot of uncertainties, due largely to policy inconsistencies, about where people should invest. This cuts across various economic sectors. Since the current government came into power in 2015, there has been a lot of policy changes with the command and control posture adopted in managing the economy.

“For instance, exchange rates were left unfixed for the first year of the administration until the distortions in the market became chaotic before some forms of flexibility were allowed in the determination of the exchange rate, following market forces. Also, land borders were arbitrarily closed to imports, despite the huge damage it could have on the country’s trade within the ECOWAS sub-region. This had a direct impact on prices of items”.

Speaking further on the policy somersaults, the economist said, it had caused capital flight.

Nwokoma added, “This political uncertainty played a role in the downward trend of markets. In the equities market, huge foreign portfolio investments were lost to the economy. There has also been a downturn in portfolio investments, fixed capital investment, foreign direct investments and capital importation.

“There was also a record decline in capital importation of about $1,548.88 million in the fourth quarter of 2016, a 15 per cent decrease from the third quarter of same year. And in the first quarter