42m Nigerians Jobless ,from a possible 160m,

Reliable data from Federal Government sources have shown that the nation has been in uninterrupted mess over unemployment in the past 14 years.
With data from the National Bureau of Statistics available to Daily Sun, we can authoritatively reveal that between 1999 and 2011, the nation witnessed a sharp drop in the employment ratio by 15.7 percent. Unfortunately, in the 12 years data obtained, there was no increase or improvement in any year in the years reviewed.

Whereas the nation, from the document, had an unemployment ratio of 8.2 percent in 1999, it plummeted to 13.1 percent the following year, a sharp decline of about five percent. Request About the first week of February, Daily Sun had written the Bureau and the Ministry of Labour and Productivity to obtain from them authentic and official documents on jobs creation and losses in the country since 2005.

After very long and rigorous delays, Daily Sun incidentally got a copy of the document from the Bureau with startling figures on the dwindling fortunes of the nation's economy as depicted by the unemployment rate and the steady decline to worse situations in the past four years. The Labour Ministry has, however, not found it worthy to give any reply to our request. What looked like a reply was a text message a very senior officer of the ministry sent indicating subtly that the ministry had no such data.

He sent a message that the request did not get to him, although at the point of submission at the office, the letter was duly acknowledged. But he later added in verbal communication on phone, the off-the-record style, that he was not sure the ministry had any such document and that should be the reason the receivers of the letter since early February refused to give any form of reply. Ironically, the years sampled had been the ones in which Nigeria had experimented in democracy.

Under reported However, while the data from the Bureau remains the official figure, some other sources available to us indicate the Bureau must have underestimated or under reported the development. In March 2009, the World Bank published a document that Nigeria had about 40 million jobless citizens. The report put the percentage of joblessness at 28.57. In the same 2009, contrary to World Bank records, the Bureau stated that the unemployment ratio was 19.7percent.

The admittance of the FG that the World Bank record was authentic through the Labour Ministry in the same month of publication was a popular media issue that was widely reported. Based on the corroboration by the FG and the fact that between 2009 and 2011, the rate dropped to 23.9percent, according to the Bureau data, that implies simultaneously that the 5percent percent drop adopted in the World Bank's figure within the period means the actual unemployment rate would be about 32.77percent, some 42 million persons in raw figure as at 2011.

-naij.com