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However, Anambra tops the list of fully employed personnel from the South-East geo-political zone with 845,310 people while battling with a 44.22% unemployment rate; Imo State has the highest unemployment rate of 56.64% in the zone while 340,034 individuals are fully employed. The States with the lowest unemployment rates were Osun, Benue and Zamfara States with 11.65%, 11.98% and 12.99% respectively. The large civil service population per capita in Osun state may have been a determining factor in the low unemployment rate in the state. And while a large section of worker engaged in the farming sector fall under the underemployed cadre, a significant portion of the people in Zamfara and Benue states would find themselves engaged in farming for at least 40 hours weekly. In the case of underemployment, Benue State, a largely agrarian state and one of the largest food producers in the nation with the alias “food basket of the nation”, recorded the highest under-employed rate with 43.52%, followed by Zamfara and Jigawa States with 41.73% and 41.29% respectively. Kano state again shows up on the unemployed ranking at number 12 with just about half of Lagos’ unemployed people’s number at 717,000 while Lagos still struggles with a whopping 1.85 million unemployed people.
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Rivers state unemployed figure comes 2nd with 1.65 unemployed people; while Akwa Ibom, Kaduna, and Imo state follow it closely with 1.26 million, 1.11 million, 1.10 million unemployed people’s number on the 3rd, 4th and 5th slots respectively. The unemployment rate keeps rising every quarter since 2014. As of the 2nd quarter of 2014, the unemployment rate in Nigeria was 6.4%. Barely 5 years after, it has shot up to 33.3% of the entire labour force. The data from all of the 36 states and the FCT is plain enough. A combination of geographical/topographical, historical, political and economic reasons may have predisposed these states to the swinging employment statistics which they have displayed over time. But in all of these, the willingness and intentionality of the leadership in each state in repositioning their fortune matter too. Looking at the statistics of employment versus that of its close cousin – underemployment; underemployment keeps filling the void that the inadequacy of agricultural industry jobs cannot satisfy in the short term. And until we get the bulk of local agriculture mechanised while enabling the promising services industry to grow in leaps and bounds, we may not see unemployment and underemployment rates within the country decrease in little time. Featured Image Source: Council On Foreign Relations
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