Nigeria's unemployment crisis By Reuben Abati
Labour Minister, Adetokunbo Kayode quoting the World Bank says Nigeria has a population of 40 million unemployed persons. How did the World Bank arrive at this figure? What methods did its researchers adopt? It is shameful that Nigeria's Labour Minister cites the figure with so much glee and without a tinge of embarrassment.
That Nigeria has to rely on the World Bank to assess the number of the unemployed among its people is a reflection of the country's underdevelopment. There is a Federal Office of Statistics. But it is under-funded and routinely ignored by policy makers.
Nigeria suffers veritably from the ill of planning without statistics. We don't even know how many we are exactly and there is no central database in any of the country's sectors providing basic statistics.
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