My Thoughts Have No Filter – By Abdul’Azeez Bello
WhatsApp: 0805 113 0075 | omobolajibello@gmail.com
Let me describe a scene that millions of families know intimately.
A young man or woman spends four to six years (hopefully) in a university. They survive the strikes, the poor hostels, the overcrowded lecture halls, the lecturers who dictate thirty-year-old notes and call it teaching. They survive the examination halls that are actually rooms of spiritual warfare. They survive final year projects, the ASUU shutdowns.
They graduate. Their parents throw a party. Relatives who have not visited in years suddenly appear to celebrate. Photos are taken in gowns. Plans are made. Dreams are dusted off and arranged on the shelf.
And then.
About 1.7 million graduates leave Nigeria’s universities and polytechnics annually. The formal economy accommodates nowhere near that position. And it has not done so in living memory.
One point seven million graduates! Every year!! Entering a job market that is not waiting for them, has not prepared for them and frankly does not have enough room for them. The conveyor belt keeps producing. The warehouse keeps filling. And nobody in authority appears alarmed enough to do something serious about it.
Nearly 80 million Nigerian youth are unemployed, underscoring the alarming crisis of wasted potential in Africa’s most populous country.
Eighty million. Let that number breathe! Eighty million young Nigerians who woke up this morning without a job. Without income. Without a professional purpose. Without the dignity that comes from being able to support yourself and contribute to your society. Eighty million young people with energy, education, ideas and nowhere to put any of it.
This is not a statistic. This is a national emergency wearing the face of a generation.
Now here is where it gets interesting and by interesting I mean deeply, impressively dishonest.
The official unemployment rate stood at 4.3 percent in Q2 2024 according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That sounds almost respectable. Almost manageable.
But that number is doing a magic trick. And the trick is called methodology.
The most recent National Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey places Nigeria’s youth unemployment rate at 33.3 percent for the 15 to 34 age brackets.
Wait. So how is the official rate 4.3 percent but the actual youth rate is 33.3 percent? Because the NBS changed its methodology to align with international standards, which counts someone as employed if they worked even one hour in the reference week. The man who sold groundnuts for one hour on Tuesday? Employed. The woman who plaited one head on Wednesday? Employed. The graduate who drove an Uber twice this month? Employed.
Approximately 96 percent of employed youth navigate the informal sector, facing chronic income instability, widespread underemployment, and a frustrating disconnect between the education provided and the skills the market actually demands.
Ninety-six percent in the informal sector. Almost every employed young Nigerian is either selling something, fixing something, carrying something or doing some version of a hustle that has no pension, no health insurance, no career progression and no security whatsoever. One bad month and they are back to zero. This is not employment. This is managed survival.
Your Degree Is Not the Problem. The System That Cannot Use It Is.
Let me address something before the usual crowd shows up to say that Nigerian graduates are lazy or unwilling to work.
Nigeria today is teeming with talented graduates. The system, not the people, is at fault.
There are over 114,000 software developers in Nigeria. 28 percent are unemployed and another 27.6 percent are underemployed. These are people with skills that are in global demand. Skills that companies in Europe and North America are paying serious salaries to acquire. And in Nigeria, more than half of them are either without work or working below their capacity.
If the problem were the graduates, why are Nigerian professionals thriving everywhere else they go? Why do Nigerian doctors run wards in the UK? Why do Nigerian engineers build things in Canada? Why do Nigerian tech talent work for companies in Germany?
Only 10 percent of employers view graduates as skilled, a sentiment that persists in growth sectors like IT and healthcare. The universities are producing graduates who have theoretical knowledge but lack practical industry competencies. The curriculum has not kept pace with what the economy actually needs. So, you have a double tragedy. An economy that cannot absorb graduates and a university system producing graduates that the economy, even at its best, would struggle to place directly.
Everybody failed the Nigerian graduate. The government. The universities. The private sector. And they are all pointing at each other.
The Government’s Employment Programmes: A Comedy in Several Acts
Nigeria loves a good employment programme. They arrive with beautiful names, generous budgets and impressive launch ceremonies. Ministers give speeches. Beneficiaries are photographed holding tools or laptops. The programme runs for a while. The budget ends. The beneficiaries disperse. Nothing structurally changes.
Successive governments have prioritized youth education and skills development, yet these initiatives have yet to make a significant mark in the high unemployment rates.
N-Power. TraderMoni. MarketMoni. The Social Investment Programmes. The various Graduate Employability schemes. The Youth Employment Action Plan. Each one announced with energy. Each one producing reports. Few producing lasting, structural employment.
38 percent of youth returned to unemployment or underemployment after exiting government employment programmes. More than one in three people who went through a government employment programme ended up back where they started. Because the programme gave them a skill or a stipend but did not create the economic environment where that skill has a market.
You cannot solve a structural unemployment crisis with programmes. You solve it by building an economy.
What Hunger Does to a Young Person With a Degree
Let me bring this back to the street because that is where it actually lives.
A hungry man is an angry man. But what about a hungry man with a degree, with ambition, with skills, with years of investment behind him and nothing to show for it.
That is a different kind of hunger. It is not just stomach hunger. It is the hunger of dignity denied. Of potential locked in a room with no door. Of watching peers in other countries build careers while you build a CV that nobody calls back about.
That young man is not a statistic. He is the nephew in your family WhatsApp group who everyone is quietly worried about. She is the daughter who graduated two years ago and is still at home. He is the friend from university who is now doing something nobody expected, not because they wanted to but because something had to pay the bills.
Unemployment is the second biggest issue Nigerian youth want government to address, behind only cost of living. The government knows this. The data is not a secret. The youth are not silent about it. And yet the economy that could absorb, reward and retain them keeps failing to materialise at the pace that eighty million waiting young people need.
The Gender Wound Nobody Talks About Loudly Enough
Before we move to solutions, one more thing needs to be said clearly. Those Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET)
Female graduates face an unemployment rate of 28.7 percent compared to 18.4 percent for male graduates. Female youth are more likely to be in the NEET category with a NEET rate of 31.4 percent compared to 26.1 percent for males.
The unemployment crisis hits Nigerian young women harder. A Nigerian woman who studied, who graduated, who showed up, faces a labour market that is even less interested in her than it is in her male counterpart. She carries the weight of family expectations about marriage and domesticity on top of the weight of an economy that does not prioritise her employability.
That is not acceptable. It is not acceptable in 2026. It is not acceptable in Africa’s largest economy. And it deserves to be said loudly alongside every other unemployment statistic.
The Way Forward
The unemployment factory must be shut down and replaced with something that actually works. Here is what that looks like.
Build an economy that creates real jobs, not just programmes.
Manufacturing, agriculture, construction, technology, healthcare, each of these sectors can absorb hundreds of thousands of young Nigerians if the investment climate, the infrastructure and the policy environment support their growth. A factory that opens in a Nigerian city is not just a factory. It is hundreds of salaries, hundreds of families stabilized and hundreds of young people with somewhere to go every day.
Reform the education system to produce work-ready graduates.
Nigeria’s labour market continues to grapple with persistent skills mismatch, where job seekers hold qualifications that do not correspond to the requirements of employers. Practical training, internships and industry attachments must be built into every degree programme, not offered as optional extras.
Fix the environment for small businesses and entrepreneurship.
Most young Nigerians who create jobs do it through small businesses. Those businesses need affordable credit, reliable electricity, functional infrastructure and a regulatory environment that does not treat starting a business like a spiritual warfare exercise. Fix the environment and entrepreneurship will absorb millions who the formal sector cannot reach.
Make employment programmes structurally transformative, not cosmetic.
Stop announcing programmes that offer stipends and skills without creating markets for those skills. Every government employment initiative must be evaluated on one question: does this lead to lasting employment or does it lead back to the queue? If the answer is the queue, redesign it.
Close the gender employment gap deliberately.
Targeted initiatives for young women in employment must be a specific policy priority, not an afterthought in a general youth employment framework. The data is clear. The gap is real. The response must be proportional.
The Verdict
Nigeria is facing a profound structural imbalance where a rapidly expanding youth population, over 60 percent of whom are under age 25, is consistently outpacing the economy’s capacity for job creation.
That sentence from an April 2026 research report is the most honest summary of where Nigeria stands. The population is growing faster than the economy. The graduates are being produced faster than the jobs. The young people are arriving at the labour market faster than the labour market is ready to receive them.
And every year that this continues is a year of wasted human capital that Nigeria cannot recover.
Eighty million young Nigerians are not a burden. They are Nigeria’s greatest asset, sitting idle because the people responsible for building an economy that uses them have been too busy building careers for themselves to notice.
The unemployment factory keeps running. The graduates keep coming out. The jobs not there.
Abdul’Azeez Bello writes from the streets of Nigeria, where the truth is always louder than the headlines.
My Thoughts Have No Filter.
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