The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says 21.7 million Nigerians are unemployed, this is more than a quarter of Nigeria’s workers.
The NBS, in Nigeria’s first unemployment data published since 2018 said the unemployment rate stood at 27.1% in the second quarter.
It stood at 23.1% in the previous report, which dates back to the third quarter of 2018.
Second-quarter unemployment among young people aged 15-34 was the highest at 34.9%.
Nigeria has been hard-hit by the fallout from the new coronavirus pandemic, grappling not only with its own outbreak, but also from a plunge in oil prices after lockdowns worldwide.
The country had 48,116 confirmed cases and 966 deaths as of Friday.
Nigeria entered the pandemic without having fully recovered from a 2016 recession that left more than 13 million people unemployed.
The World Bank has warned Nigeria faces a recession that will be “much more pronounced” than in 2016 and potentially the nation’s worst financial crisis in four decades.
