Anambra has lowest unemployment rate in Nigeria – NBS

Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has declared Anambra State as the state with the lowest unemployment rate in Nigeria with 13.1 per cent out of the total working population of 2.25 million people.

According to the data, Anambra State was the least by the agency ranking of the 36 states and the FCT, Abuja, unemployment figure with about 1.9 million people in the state who are either fully employed (1.57 million) or under-employed (384k) in the state. The national average figure for the unemployment rate is 27.1 per cent.

However, the agency revealed that Imo State has the highest unemployment rate in the country. The state has an unemployment rate of 48.7 per cent as at the second quarter of 2020, by far, the highest when compared to any other state in the country. According to the data, 75.1 per cent of the total employable people in the state are either underemployed or unemployed.

The agency gave the breakdown as follows: Total number of employable people – 2.48 million, fully employed people – 618, 481; unemployed people in the state – 593. 347 while underemployed is 656, 394

“Imo State is largely a civil service town and has been unlucky with state governors over the last 20 years and private sector jobs are hard to come by in the serene state with most industries setting up show in nearby cities like Aba, Port Harcourt, and Onitsha. The city was once notorious for ritual motivated murders and kidnaping but has since overcome these challenges,” the agency posited.

Meanwhile NBS further revealed that Akwa Ibom State is next on the list with an unemployment rate of 1.14 million people. The state’s underemployed population is about 551k people while the unemployment and underemployment rates combined are 66.9 per cent..

Moreover, the NBS also revealed that Lagos, which is Nigeria’s commercial capital and where most graduates rush to for jobs currently has an unemployment rate of 19.5 per cent and sits at 27 in the country by state unemployment ladder.

The data shows that about 6.8 million people make up the labour force population in Lagos State, out of which 3.99 million people are fully employed and another 1.5 million people are underemployed while about 870k Lagosians who are employable did absolutely nothing.

Sadly, in terms of the concentration of unemployed people, NBS ranked Rivers State as the first with a whopping 1.7 million people out of jobs in the state.

“The state has a working population of 3.9 million with unemployment rate of 43.7 per cent and ranks third as the worst in the country as 21.7 million Nigerians are unemployed,” the statistics revealed.