The Shambolic Management Of Nigeria’s Unemployment Data By Bolaji Olatunde

 

 

The keen watchers of Nigeria’s socioeconomic and political sphere, and even the uninterested, given the attention it garnered, could not have avoided news about the nation’s economic statistics for the second quarter of 2020 which were released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on the 14th of August 2020. Every quarter, the nation goes through the ritual of receiving socioeconomic indices from the NBS which is charged by section 2(h) of the Statistics Act 2007 to “collect, process, analyze and disseminate quality data.” In terms of disseminating data, the NBS has fulfilled its mandate. As regards the collection, processing and analysis of data with respect to the unemployment position in Nigeria, I am of the considered opinion that the NBS has not fulfilled its responsibilities to the best of its abilities. I make bold to say that whatever accolades the NBS under the leadership of Dr Yemi Kale has received for the Q2 2020 unemployment report is for a job half done.

I would advise any entity that wishes to plan its economic activities around the unemployment figures released by the NBS to halt such plans in their tracks. I often pass the lighthearted comment (after the fashion of the witticism by the American humourist Mark Twain), that there are three kinds of lies─lies, damned lies and Nigerian statistics. The first major lie includes the various figures often stated to be Nigeria’s population census, which fluctuates according to several factors, including various mixes of the ethnoreligious background, location and preferred alcoholic beverage and/or illegal substance of the individual stating the figure. The last population census carried out by Nigeria was in 2006. The nation is like that polygamous father who is humorously said not to know the number of children he has sired─not a few Nigerians will be hesitant to label that father a responsible scion.   

My first misgiving about the unemployment figure released is that it was based on a “survey”; the official title of the document released to the public domain is the “Abridged Labour Force Survey Under COVID-19”. It is generally assumed by the masses that many Nigerian state-owned entities do not believe that the ordinary Nigerian on the street counts. It is therefore not surprising that the NBS calibrates the unemployment rate based on a very unreliable tool such as a survey that entails the random sampling of households. Nigeria’s unemployment is too serious to be left to a “survey”. The NBS report states that this particular survey was carried out using ten interviewers per state who surveyed fifty households in each state. The NBS interviewers reportedly conducted a total of 18,500 interviews. The results of the survey were then supposedly then juxtaposed against the labour force. The NBS places Nigeria’s total labour force at about 80,291,894 people. The data integrity of the method of determining this estimated labour force figure is, at best, on very shaky grounds, given that we don’t know how many Nigerians there are. It could not have been done by anything other than pure magic, something akin to creative accounting.

It is untenable that Nigeria does not have an unemployment register, which should be a register of those who are willing and able to work but have no jobs. The data of ALL Nigerians willing and able to work but who are unemployed can be collated at regular intervals─there is sufficient technology to do that. I am not aware that a national exercise aimed solely at that purpose has been conducted. Such Nigerians captured, with provisions for them to input their National Identity Numbers (NIN) and/or Bank Verification Number (BVN), can either update their records online, when they transit from the unemployment market to the securing jobs, or vice versa. Many young Nigerians who are most affected by the unemployment scourge are tech-savvy and either own smart phones or if they cannot afford it, know someone that does. For the unlettered among the labour force, they may be asked to have someone do it on their behalf. This citizen-generated data is, at this point, I daresay, the most reliable method of determining Nigeria’s actual unemployment rate, if a winning strategy for tackling unemployment is to be devised.

Nigeria’s unemployment conundrum should not be left to the devices of a survey. The NBS, will probably state in its defense, that the unemployment statistics of developed nations such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom, are determined by the use of periodic surveys, but will not refer to the fact that Nigeria’s socioeconomic statistics cannot boast of the data integrity of the general statistics those nations have.  Creating and maintaining a national unemployment register will no doubt give the unemployment data the four V’s of “big data” which are volume, velocity, veracity and variety, which are necessary for it to be as accurate as can be humanly attainable, given the possible margins of error. Granted, maintaining such a register by having unemployed Nigerians regularly update their employment statuses may be herculean, but it can be done by incentivizing them in any way or form to be determined by the appropriate authorities, including social intervention projects.  

 

The use of citizen-generated data is not unknown to modern economic policy implementation and planning. Alan Greenspan, the longest serving chairman of the Federal Reserve (as the central bank of the United States of America is known), in his memoirs, “The Age Of Turbulence” recounted how he would often monitor the impact of the implementation of certain economic policies of the government by observing the number of Americans who filed weekly for unemployment benefits.  

Achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among which are poverty reduction, decent work and economic growth, cannot be attained without proper data because they are needful for determining actual priorities and decision-making by Nigeria’s political leadership. Granted, the cost of acquiring and processing data can be extremely high. The Development Co-operation Report 2017 report issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that 144 developing countries in the world require about $3 billion US dollars annually (at least ₦9 billion naira per nation, assuming all nations were to require the same amount) to produce data to measure SDG indicators, among which is the unemployment rate. As at the time of penning this essay, the 2020 budget of the NBS could neither be located either on its official website or that of the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and Financial Planning, which supervises over 17 parastatals and has a total allocation of ₦18.57 billion in the 2020 Appropriation (Repeal and Enactment) Act. Financial constraints notwithstanding, the OECD advocates for harnessing new technologies to accumulate and process more accurate data.

What exactly is Nigeria’s unemployment rate? Stears Business, the intelligence data analysis company, places Nigeria’s estimated unemployment rate at 39%. What do I think the true unemployment figure of Nigeria is? I believe it is worse than the 27.3 per cent reported by the NBS (which the bureau, states in its report, places Nigeria in the veritable company of Angola, Namibia and South Africa with unemployment rates that exceed 30% and are among the top five highest in the world). I use the word “believe” deliberately─it is more than likely that the NBS arrived at its own statistic that way, through the Nigerian cure for almost everything─belief, sprinkled with a little dose of random sampling.