The National Bureau of Statistics, NBS says it will publish Nigeria’s second quarter 2020 Unemployment and Underemployment Report on Friday, August 14 by 8.30 am.
Statistician-General of the Federation, Dr. Yemi Kale made this known in a tweet on his personal Twitter handle. The graphics he shared showed that the NBS will publish the Labour Force Statistics which contains the Unemployment and Underemployment Report. It will however be an “Abridged Labour Force Survey Under Covid-19”.
The last of such report by the Bureau was published for the third quarter of 2018 with the unemployment rate put at 23.1%. It means there has not been any official release of Nigeria’s unemployment rate for the past 6 quarters of Q4 2018 to Q1 2020. The last figures show that there was a 4.3% increase from the 18.8% in the third quarter of 2017.
There was so much controversy at the time as to why the figures were not published at a time the country was heading into the 2019 general elections. The NBS had explained that its failure to publish the report was not political as widely speculated but due to the challenges of funding the survey.
At the time the Federal Government provided funds for the Bureau to continue with the survey, its operations were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is not clear how the 6 unreported quarters will be handled in the report that will be released on Friday.
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The period of April to June 2020 covered by the survey which findings will be published in the report is the Covid-19 pandemic era when there was a lockdown with a number of jobs lost especially in the formal and informal sectors. Similar reports released in other countries including the United States and United Kingdom show historic rise in the unemployment rates occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic.
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