UNEMPLOYMENT IN NIGERIA

BY EMMANUEL ELO COVENANT  

 

If you ask any graduate in Benin City right now what is stressing them, most won’t say fuel price first. They will say job. Unemployment in Nigeria has moved past the NBS tables. It is now the guy with a B.A in English who is running a POS in Ekenwan Road, and the first-class girl teaching JSS2 for 20k a month. People blame “the economy” like it is one thing. But the economy is people, and in Nigeria two things keep breaking it. First, the way government jobs are given out. Second, how young people react when they can’t get real work. Because of slot selling and ghost workers, qualified people can’t enter. Because of underemployment, many end up with japa plans, side hustles, or worse. If we don’t fix recruitment and make legal work pay, we will keep exporting graduates and importing problems.

 

Let me start with recruitment. On paper, Section 14(3) of the 1999 Constitution talks about federal character. The idea is simple: jobs should be shared fairly across the country, and merit should matter. On ground, it rarely works like that. A lot of MDAs have what people call “slots.” These are vacancies that are kept aside and sold later. Nobody writes it down. Nobody audits it. If you can’t pay, you lose the job to someone who can, even if that person barely passed. And when it’s not sold, it’s given to a cousin, a party member, or someone’s girlfriend. Their names go on IPPIS, but they never come to the office. That’s the ghost worker issue. I’ve heard of cases where politicians use ghost names to move money during elections. So the civil service gets weaker, and the graduate who studied hard is left outside the gate. That’s not theory. That’s what happens.

 

The second issue is underemployment, and this one hides the real pain. Underemployment means you are working, but the work does not match your certificate or your bills. NBS can say unemployment is 5% or 8%, but walk around and you’ll see engineers doing sales, and accountants doing dispatch. A friend of mine graduated with 4.6 from UNIBEN, Mechanical Engineering. Last year he was managing a boutique in Ugbowo. The pay could not even cover rent and NEPA. So what do people do? They collect the small job to avoid idleness, then run a side hustle at night. Some people hustle to survive. Others hustle to save money and leave the country. That’s where japa comes from. It’s not that everybody hates Nigeria. It’s that Nigeria is not giving them a reason to stay. When your degree cannot feed you, another country starts looking like home.

 

Now, crime. I need to be clear here. Not every jobless youth is a yahoo boy or a thief. That would be a lie. But we can’t pretend there’s no link. Talk to some guys on the streets and they will tell you plainly: “Oga, 40k salary cannot do anything.” If one fraud job gives them 400k in a week, the temptation is real. Some of them even use words like “financially gallant” to describe it. Dangerous logic, yes. But it comes from a place of frustration. When recruitment is dirty, when pay is low, when light and transport alone will finish your salary, some people take shortcuts. The end result is more insecurity, more EFCC arrests, more broken families. The root is still money and a system that looks rigged.

 

What makes it worse is that everybody acts like it’s normal. Slot selling is “unwritten.” Ghost work is “how things are done.” The people who should arrest it are sometimes the ones benefitting. So there’s no data, no prosecution, no shame. And youths watch this and conclude that waiting is for fools. That belief pushes more people to japa. For a few, it pushes them to crime. It also kills trust. If you don’t trust how jobs are given, you won’t trust government. If you don’t trust government, you won’t build at home. The country loses skills, it loses taxes, and it loses peace.

 

So what can be done? First, recruitment must be open. Publish the vacancies, publish the shortlist, publish the final list. Let there be an independent audit of payrolls every year to cut ghost workers and jail those behind it. Tech can help, but tech without will is just another app. Second, enforce federal character for real. Fairness does not mean dropping standards. It means a qualified candidate from Edo should not lose to someone who paid 2 million. Third, make legal work worth it. Control inflation, fix power, and support SMEs because they are the ones employing graduates, not government alone. Fourth, link training to jobs. Too many universities are producing certificates without skills. We need more technical colleges, more apprenticeships, more partnerships with companies. Lastly, separate desperation from criminality. Yes, punish crime. But also remove the economic trap that pushes people into it.

 

To end this, unemployment in Nigeria is not just about youths being lazy. It’s about a broken door at the entrance and a narrow road after you enter. Slot trading and ghost work lock qualified people out. Underemployment becomes the only option. For some, crime looks like the fastest way out. This is a governance problem that has become a youth problem. If government cleans recruitment, enforces the constitution, and grows an economy where a degree means something, things will change. If not, we will keep training people for Canada, UK, and Germany, and we will keep paying for it here at home.