Despite high unemployment rates, Reno Omokri, a former presidential aide, estimates that Nigeria has over half a million job openings in the oil and construction industries.

Omokri, in a statement on X on Sunday, claimed that Nigeria’s high unemployment rate is not due to a lack of available jobs but rather a shortage of necessary skills among the Nigerian workforce.

He said Nigerians are not acquiring the necessary skills in areas such as plumbing, carpentry, welding, and masonry, forcing the country to rely on foreign workers.

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These types of skills are often referred to as blue-collar, which is used to describe workers who perform manual labour, work at factory jobs, or do any other type of labour that does not involve working in an office.

However, according to him, these positions remain unfilled due to the reluctance of Nigerians to acquire these specific skills.

Omokri cited the example of Dangote’s refinery, which had to import 11,000 technicians from India due to a lack of qualified Nigerians, adding that these Indians are earning a minimum of the equivalent of $750 a month in Naira.

He stated, “There is a lot of unemployment in Nigeria, not necessarily because there are no jobs. The actual cause of unemployment in Nigeria is that there are no skills. Please fact-check me. There are over half a million vacancies in Nigeria in the oil sector and the construction industry in plumbing, carpentry, drywalling, welding, roofing and masonry, etc. But Nigerians do not like to study those skills. As a result, Nigeria imports thousands of Filipinos, Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Beninoise, Togolese, Ghanaians, and other foreigners to do these jobs we refuse to do.

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“Please fact-check me: When Dangote needed technicians for his refinery, he could not find up to one thousand qualified Nigerians. He had to import eleven thousand technicians from India, or that refinery would not have been completed on schedule. These Indians are earning a minimum of the equivalent of $750 a month in naira.”

He contrasted this with the large number of Nigerian graduates holding degrees in fields he termed “dead courses,” such as sociology, philosophy, linguistics, political science, library science, religious studies, and anthropology.

Omokri argued that these graduates often blame unemployment on bad governance rather than the gap between their qualifications and the demands of the job market, stating that there are no jobs suited for those dead courses but there are jobs in Nigeria.

He also stressed that “Nigerians erroneously think all degrees are equal. No. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics degrees are superior to all others. Followed by Business, Economics, Law, Education, and Accounting, the rest are low-priority courses. Abroad, they are called vanity courses and many universities are shutting them down as a drain on the economy.

“It is a bitter fact, I know, but it is true. In terms of value, a non-graduate who studied the skills of Nursing, Cloud Computing, Web Design, Ethical Hacking, Blockchain, laboratory technology, etc., is more valuable to the economy than a graduate who read sociology or philosophy. Keep deceiving yourself with, ‘I am a degree holder!’ Degree isonu!”

Nigeria’s Dichotomy: Low Unemployment

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), an unemployed person is a person aged 15 or over who simultaneously meets three conditions: being unemployed for a given week; being available to take a job within two weeks; having actively sought a job in the last four weeks; or having found one starting in less than three months.

For the new Nigeria Labour Force Survey (NLFS), “employed” covers anyone who worked one hour or more for pay or profit in the last seven days, even if they were temporarily absent. The “unemployed” are those individuals who are not employed but are (1) actively searching for paid work and (2) available to start paid work, either last week or within the next two weeks.

In Q3 2023, the labour force participation rate in Nigeria was 79.5%, having been 80.4% in Q2 2023. The participation rate among men was 80.9% and 78.2% for women. Persons living in rural areas are more likely to participate in labour activities than urban dwellers, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

In Q3 2023, 75.6% of Nigeria’s working-age population was in employment. Disaggregating by sex, the employment-to-population ratio was 77.7% for males and 73.5% for females. The employment-to-population ratio in urban areas was 71.1% and 80.7% in rural areas.

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Informal employment in Nigeria and other developing countries seems to be very high when compared to developed countries. The share of employed persons in informal employment was 92.3% in Q3 2023, a reduction of 0.4% when compared to 92.7% in the previous quarter.

The rate of women in informal employment is significantly higher than that of men. The rate of informal employment among people living in rural areas was 97.2% while the urban informality rate was estimated at 87.5%. Females are more likely to be in informal employment than males, the NBS added.

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