Nigeria Tripled Unemployment Rate in 5 Years!
Nigeria has a labour force of about 80.2 million people. Between 2015 and now, the nation has tripled its unemployment rate. Currently, that rate is 27.1% which means that 21.7 million Nigerians are without jobs. A big challenge is the consistent outpacing of economic growth rate by population growth rate. This trajectory does imply that generations of Nigerians are getting poorer as the per capita income is dropping (all data, National Bureau of Statistics).
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It is not that we are too many, just that productivity output is abysmal. Based on quantity of graduates we have produced here, you can as well argue that we are perhaps one of the laziest countries in the world.
A lazy brain might be tempted to believe that by controlling the population you can reverse the fall. Not really, you can only manage to postpone your doomsday by couple of years; but you will still collapse.
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You can have five kids and send them to school where you pay total of N100k per annum, and you can have just two kids and send both to a school where you pay N400k per head, two kids translating to N800k per annum. Has population size helped you? Not at all, until you increase your productivity from earning N200k per month to N1M, playing the population game will still disappoint you.
Our problem is pretty simple: why are we underperforming? We haven't addressed that, but we think we are smart.
You spend six hours of your day on traffic, then believing that once you get to the office you are really performing optimally. You will remain sub par, even your best effort is just average.
That you sweat in your workshop doesn't mean your output is fantastic, and this is what goes on across board in Nigeria.