Government to register unemployed Nigerians

The federal government has concluded plans to develop a database of all unemployed persons in Nigeria, the minister of labour and productivity, Chukwuemeka Wogu, has said.

The minister said registering the unemployed in the country is necessary because nobody knows the number of Nigerians that are unemployed, and planning activity has been based on extrapolation. He said when this is completed, employers will have easy access to labour while the platform will be very useful for all activities in economic planning.

“Unemployment has been a major problem in the country and has impeded on economic growth of the nation,” he said. “It is a global problem now since both emerging and established economies are battling with problems of unemployment which has been worsened by the fact of global recession which has been there for some time now. Inasmuch as we agree that there is a high incidence of unemployment; nobody has been able to have an approximate knowledge of the figure not to talk about exactitude though you cannot have the exact figure. We do not have that. It is only recently that the minister of finance said it is 19 per cent based on National Bureau of Statistics information. So because of this inaccurate data, we now went into registration of unemployed people and to have a data base on it.”

Mr. Wogu explained that an implementation committee, which comprises members from government ministries, private sector and technical experts on ICT, was set up to articulate this project and had submitted a report which indicates that the first stage of the project will involve the designing of an architectural platform that would be the basis for the data base.

“The essence of the data base is to capture at least 90 per cent of the unemployed people through various means of data capturing using facilities that are already in existence, which are state offices of the labour ministry and National Directorate of Employment,” he said.

Abuja pilot project

When the architectural platform is established, the next step will be the development and deployment of publicity modules, followed by the recruitment and training of frontline operators and monitoring officers who do the registration and also help determine the situation of the unemployed persons.

“The last issues are output and analysis of the data and issuing of reports. Tied to this is an outline of major deliverables we intend to achieve. After this is the major activity which now has a timeline,” he said.

The minister equally said that a pilot of this project will start off soon in FCT, after which other states will be covered. To avoid double registration, the ministry said it plans to introduce some biometrics in the process, even as it indicated its determination to collaborate with the National Planning Commission and the National Bureau of Statistics in this project.