The Statistician-General of the Federation, Dr. Yemi Kale, has attributed the delay in the publication of Nigeria’s unemployment figures on timely basis to paucity of funds.
Kale said that official statistics producing and reporting agency, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), could not complete the unemployment reports for some quarters now due to budgetary constraints, in terms of fund releases by the Federal Government.
Over the past months, the Bureau had shifted the date of the Unemployment report by about two times, the latest date now being December 7, this year.
According to the last published Unemployment rate report by the Bureau in 2017, the number of unemployed people within the labour force who were unemployed or underemployed increased from 13.6 million and 17.7 million respectively in Q2 2017 to 15.9 million and 18.0 million in Q3 2017,
Kale, worried by the insinuations that the delay of the publication was for political reasons, had tweeted that Nigerians should not politicise the non-release of unemployment report.
He tweeted: “I know it’s election time but I’ve said this repeatedly. Nobody is calling me to manipulate any data or not to release any data.
“The work can’t be completed due to budgetary releases. It’s not hard to confirm when last we got data funding and how much”, the Statistician General stated.
