Unemployment situation in Nigeria worse than NBS report —NECA

One of the issues that dominated the just concluded 106th session of the International Labour Conference, ILC, in Geneva, Switzerland, was the Green economy. Director General of Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association of Nigeria, NECA, Mr. Segun Oshinowo, who led a team of employers’ representatives to the conference, had a chat with a cross session of Nigerian journalists at the conference on Green economy among others, and declared that while Nigeria is not ready for the green economy, the unemployment situation in Nigeria is worse than the statistics presented by National Bureau of Statistics, NBS.





What do you think government can do or put in place for greener economy to take place in Nigeria?


We are not yet there at all. If you are talking about green initiatives, you are talking about green jobs. The stage we are now really, going by the statistics the NBS released recently, almost about 12.2million Nigerians are unemployed. I can tell you that is quite conservative, very, very conservative. In fact, I won’t believe it because if 75 per cent of our populations are youths and you apply the unemployment rate in Nigeria to that youthful hands in our demographic profile, the figure you will  get , will be far more than 12.2million.

Now, if you want to promote a green job initiative, the issue is that, when you look at the environment in Nigeria, what type of job is the Nigerian economy capable of producing now.



We have got to be really honest with ourselves; there are nothing near in the economy of green jobs. Our priority actually is to make our economy grow to a level where it can generate jobs for millions of our youths. Our youths are not looking for big jobs. They are looking for the jobs or perhaps any job for that matter,  to be engaged in.

I am saying in the context of Nigeria given the scale of unemployment we are in, what we are interested in really is, are good jobs for our youths. The next level of that engagement can now be whether those jobs are green or not. But let us engage them productively first.

Vanguard