Rising Unemployment, Unfufilled Aspirations Creating Migration Pressure — World Bank

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World Bank
World Bank

In the just concluded week, the World Bank in its freshly released report titled, “Of Roads Less Travelled: Assessing the Potential for Migration to Provide Overseas Jobs for Nigerian’s Youth”, stated that rising unemployment, booming demographics, and unfulfilled aspirations were the major factors creating pressure for young Nigerians to migrate overseas in search of greener pasture.

The report showed that the number of international migrants from Nigeria increased to 1,438,331 in 2019 from 446,806 migrants in 1990. Also, the bank noted the astronomical rise in number of refugees and asylum seekers from Nigeria within the last decade to 408,078 in 2019 from 27,557 in 2010.

Accordingly, the latest unemployment data released by the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that the unemployment rate in Nigeria increased to 33.28% in FY 2020 from 6.4% in FY 2010 – rising by 26.88 percentage points within the space of ten years – even as its working-age population increased to 122 million people with just 69.68 million as active labour force in FY 2020.

Hence, the rapidly expanding working-age population force combined with scarce local employment opportunities created migration pressure amongst Nigerian youth.

Meanwhile, Nigerians, especially from the Northeastern region, may soon enjoy some respite from the worsening insecurity as Nigeria took delivery of the first batch of six A-29 Super Tucano fighter jets.

In addition to the newly delivered six fighter jets, Nigeria still expects three J-17 fighter jets from Pakistan, six Super Tucano from the United States, and one M-171 aircraft. Hence, Bandits, Kidnappers, and Terrorists should now have a hard time operating in their strongholds.