The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Friday than over a quarter of Nigeria’s workers were out of work in the second quarter of this year.
The revelation was Nigeria’s first unemployment data published since 2018.
According to the Bureau, the unemployment rate stood at 27.1 per cent in the second quarter. It stood at 23.1 per cent in the previous report, which dates back to the third quarter of 2018.
Second-quarter unemployment among young people aged 15-34 was the highest at 34.9 per cent.
Nigeria has been hard-hit by the fallout from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which combined with a plunge in oil prices after lockdowns worldwide.
Nigeria had hardly recovered from the 2016 recession when she entered the pandemic. That devastating recession left more than 13 million people unemployed.
The disclosure by the NBS came on the heel of a distressing warning by World Bank that Nigeria faces a recession that will be “much more pronounced” than in 2016 and potentially the nation’s worst financial crisis in four decades.
