Nigeria Creates 2.5m New Jobs In 2 Years -NBS

A recent data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has shown that a total of 2.48 million new jobs were created in the Nigerian economy between third quarter, 2012 and second quarter 2014.

The Statistician General for the Federation and chief executive of the NBS, Dr Yemi Kale, gave the figure in Abuja while speaking at a workshop on the review of definition and methodology for computing unemployment statistics in Nigeria.

Kale, who announced the 2014 first and second quarters job creation figures, noted that a total number of 240,871 jobs were created in the country in the first quarter of this year, indicating a decline of 10.3 per cent from the previous quarter, which recorded 265,702 jobs.

The formal sector accounted for a total of 76,081 new jobs in the first quarter, while the informal sector accounted for the bulk of 158,894. The public sector employed 5,959 new jobs in the same quarter.

In the second quarter, a total of 259,353 new jobs were created with the formal, informal and public sectors accounting for 78,755; 175,786 and 4,812 new jobs respectively.

A breakdown of the figure revealed that the highest number of jobs were created in the informal sector with 1.41 million, while the formal sector with 903,804 jobs and public institutions with 160,591 jobs followed respectively

The number of jobs created on a quarterly basis declined by 39.3 per cent to 259,353 in the second quarter of 2014, compared to the total of 427,296 jobs created in the third quarter of 2012 when the NBS started releasing the job creation data.