A Think Tank group, the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI) has defended the two recently released reports by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Nigeria’s latest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figure and the unemployment rate, saying that reports agree with global metrics.
This is against the backdrop of claims by some critics who had sought to discredit the reports that is why were largely positive a few weeks after they had hailed a general household survey by NBS that painted a dire picture of the national economy, according to the group.
Dr. Omoniyi Akinsiju, chairman of IMPI in a policy statement released on Wednesday, noted that there was no basis to accept one report and reject another.
He said: “The NBS reported a drop in the nation’s unemployment rate from 5.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2024 to 4.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2024. This figure suggests that only about four people out of every 100 Nigerians are currently unemployed, a positive indication of a reduction in the nation’s unemployment data.
“Also, Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased to 3.46 per cent (year-on-year) in real terms in the third quarter of 2024. This growth rate is higher than the 2.54 per cent recorded in the third quarter of 2023 and the 3.19 per cent growth in the second quarter of 2024.
“Apparently, to the doubters, these figures were too good to be true. The social media space and the community of critics became unrelenting in questioning the basis of the data; some dismissed them as “voodoo data” and “propaganda figures.””
“We find this growing culture of brazen repudiation of NBS data rather inappropriate, especially when, as often, the refutation is not grounded in facts and logic. One critic dismissed the second quarter unemployment data because, in his logic, the unemployment rate could not have decreased while factories closed and businesses reported unsold inventories. Another criticized the methodology used to arrive at the figure on the ground that it lacks transparency.
“We submit that this is the crux of the matter. Most critics and commentators lack an understanding of the methodology that foregrounds the Nigeria Labour Force Survey (NLFS), even though the NBS has adopted and deployed it since the first quarter of 2023.
“In the first quarter of 2023, NBS adopted the International Labour Organization (ILO) approved and recommended methodology to measure employment and unemployment per term. The updated method aims to conform with global standards by providing a more accurate picture of the labour market in the context of the nation’s socio-demographic profile.
“In line with ILO guidelines, NBS defines employed persons as those in paid employment who have worked for at least one hour in the last seven days. This measurement contrasts the previous method, where an employed person must have worked for at least 20 hours within seven days to qualify as employed.
“However, the one hour in the last seven days labour engagement metric effectively enlarges the basis of employment measurement to include, in this case, Nigerians who are working for themselves. This expansion reflects the 71.2 million Nigerians said to be working for themselves. In contrast, just 12.96 million others work for wages out of 88.9 million in the country’s labour force, as data in the second quarter of the NBS labour force survey show.”
The policy group is of the view that the high rate of self-employed people captured in the report had a positive effect on the overall picture of employed Nigerians.
“In developing countries like Nigeria, many workers outside urban areas work in agriculture, retail finance – Point of Sales (POS), and Transportation/logistics (commercial vehicle operators, artisans, etc.).
“All these have one form of formal affiliation or the other with the Ministry of Labour and Employment through their registered unions and trade groups. The land distribution in these countries implies that the agricultural sector is dominated by self-employment on family farms, and the leading occupational choice is self-employment in farming versus non-farming, with only a tiny role for wage employment.
“This forms the basis of NBS labour survey methodology and justifies the inclusion of the vast number of self-employed Nigerians in the labour force and the segmentation of their labour engagements, which were not included in the old survey methodology.”
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