Higher education is not guarantying jobs for Nigerian youths, as the latest jobs report from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that 50 percent of Nigerians with a post-secondary school qualification are either now under-employed or unemployed. For this set of Nigerians, their situation has progressively gotten worse in 2017.
Unemployment and underemployment among this group of people has risen steadily since the beginning of 2017 from an average of 36.3 percent in the first quarter of the year to 50 percent in the third quarter. This basically means that one of every two youths graduating from the university or polytechnics across the country, has been left jobless or has been forced to accept a job well below his or her qualifications, in order to survive. They are bearing the brunt of an increasingly difficult economic environment.
The latest NBS data shows that unemployment for the general population also got worse over the period, rising to 18.8 percent, which implies an average of two out of 10 Nigerians are actively searching for jobs but cannot find any in the third quarter of 2017. Unemployment figures worsened from 16.2 percent in the second quarter of 2017. Unemployment has risen in 12 consecutive quarters since the fourth quarter of 2014, the data from NBS shows.
Under-employment among the general labour force also rose marginally to 21.2 percent in the third quarter of 2017 from 21.1 percent in the second quarter of 2017. Combined, unemployment and under-employment as a proportion of the labour force, stood at 40 percent in the third quarter, an indication that four out of every 10 people in the workforce was actually unemployed or underemployed.
“A return to economic growth provides an impetus to employment,” the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said in the report released on Friday.
“However, employment growth may lag, and unemployment rates worsen, especially at the end of a recession and for many months after,” the statistics office said, adding that it expects unemployment to peak in the fourth quarter of 2017.
By the end of September, Nigeria’s economically active or working population was 111.1 million people, said the NBS.
The report also shows that unemployment and under-employment affect mostly the youths, with an average of 52.65 percent of youths between the ages of 15-34 years either unemployed or under-employed. The magnitude of the joblessness facing Nigeria’s youthful population is seen in the NBS data which shows that 67.3 percent of young Nigerians in the age bracket 15-25 years and 42.4 percent in the age bracket 25-34 years are either unemployed or under-employed.
Based on gender, more women remained unemployed or under-employed than men, as at the third quarter of 2017. While unemployment stood at 16.5 percent for the third quarter of 2017, it was worse for women at 21.2 percent. Similarly, women were worst hit in terms of under-employment, with an average of 21.8 percent of women underemployed compared to 20.5 percent for men.
Unemployment was also worse in the urban centres than in the rural areas. While an average of 23.4 percent of the workforce resident in the urban centres were jobless in the third quarter, only 16.4 percent of rural workfoce were jobless in the same period.
In contrast, under-employment in the rural areas at 26.9 percent, was worse than under-employment of just nine percent in the urban centres. This could be an indication that many of those who cannot get jobs in the urban centres tend to migrate to rural areas to engage in make-shift farming activities.
For many of the unemployed, the pressure of being jobless has been compounded by rising cost of living, as inflation has been above double digits in the last two years, spiking up the country’s misery index. Even though President Muhammadu Buhari had campaigned on the basis of reviving the economy, a policy induced recession in 2016 has actually made things worse for many Nigerians.
However, the economy is beginning to show signs of recovery, even though the growth is mainly driven by the recovery in oil prices and production. Critical reforms that could spark a job-led economic growth has largely been neglected because they are not politically popular. Analysts have recently warned that the time for critical reforms of the Nigeria economy may have closed with all eyes increasingly focused on the 2019 elections in which President Buhari is expected to seek a second term.
