‘It Doesn’t Make Sense’ – Ex-Statistician-General Faults NBS Unemployment Data

• NBS reduces unemployment rate from 20 hours to 1 hour per week
• Former NBS statistician-general criticizes methodology

Dr. Yemi Kale, a former Statistician-General of the Federation and Chief Executive Officer of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), has criticized the methodology used to reduce Nigeria’s unemployment rate from 20 hours to one hour per week.

This comes just a week after the NBS released new data that put employment at 4.1%, down from 33.1% in 2020 when the bureau released the figure under Kale.

Unemployment was 5.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 4.1% in the first quarter of 2023.” This is consistent with rates in other developing countries where work, even if only for a few hours a day and in low-wage jobs, is essential to make ends meet, particularly in the absence of any social protection for the unemployed, the NBS said last Thursday.

In response, Kale stated that as head of the NBS, he resisted the urge to change the country’s unemployment data collection methodology further.

He appeared on Arise Television’s Global Business Report yesterday.

According to him, the committee in charge of reviewing the minimum number of work hours required to be considered employed felt that one hour did not make sense because the income generated within that time frame was not necessarily liveable.

I resisted (to change the model for unemployment methodology) for 10 years because it did not make any sense in terms of providing the information that our policymakers need.

So the 20 hours was set because the committee that was set up, which included the ILO, presented their findings and they decided that one hour did not make sense because the income you will generate on an average from one hour’s work was not going to work.

The 20 hours was decided on because it was agreed that if you work for that duration, you might be able to generate enough income that might sort of equate to what working one hour in the US is. Then you have a bit more comparison.

If the policy and data are to match, policymakers need to come out to say that all they are promising Nigerians is one hour of employment, then the methodology works. But if the methodology is focused on one hour and policymakers are trying to look for full-time employment, the data won’t help them. And is only there for textbooks, researchers, and international comparison, and there is nothing wrong with that.

But policymakers can’t use it, and I must repeat that the most important use of data is to provide information for policy not for international comparison, he said.