Usman, a lecturer in the Department of Economics, Kaduna State University, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Saturday.
The don, while reacting to the `Unemployment/Under-Employment Watch for first quarter of 2016’’ recently released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said high rate of unemployment was not good for the economy.
He said unemployment rate in the Nigerian economy climbed to 12.1 per cent in the first quarter of this year.
Usman said that the problem with Nigeria was that the majority of the unemployed were in the active youth category.
``This category of Nigerians is the ones that fought for the emergence of this government with the hope of getting some relief from their state of joblessness and hopelessness.
``The government can do better by coming up with clearly defined policies for each sector of the economy and move from wish list to actual work of getting things done.
``In that way, it can enlist the cooperation of the private sector to rejig the economy,’’ Usman said.
The NBS report says that unemployment rate climbed to 12.1 per cent in the quarter compared to 10.4 per cent in fourth quarter of 2015 and 9.9 per cent in third quarter of 2015. It further says that the number of unemployed in the labour force increased by about 1.449 million people between fourth quarter of 2015 and first quarter of 2016.
The report says that it resulted in an increase in the unemployment rate because the country was unable to create the 1.5 million jobs required in fourth quarter of 2015.
Also, the NBS stated that the active labour population -those within the working age population willing, able and actively looking for work - had increased.
This it says increased to 78.4 million from 76.9 million in fourth quarter of 2015, representing in an increase in the labour force by 1.99 per cent.
It says that an additional 1,528,647 economically active people within ages 15-64 entered the labour force between Jan. 1 and March 31, 2016.
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