Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 5.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 4.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said.
The bureau said this in its Nigeria Labour Force Survey (NLFS) report for Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 launch on Thursday.
The NBS had in March 2021 reported that Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose to 33.3 per cent, translating to some 23.2 million people, the highest in at least 13 years and the second-highest rate in the world.
The figure jumped from 27.1 per cent recorded in the second quarter of 2020 amidst Nigeria’s lingering economic crisis made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. The unemployment rate in the country has more than quadrupled since 2016 when the economy slipped into a recession.
In April 2021, the then Nigeria’s Minister of Labour, Chris Ngige, claimed that the World Bank questioned the methodology employed by the NBS to generate its employment…
