Dike Onwuamaeze The federal government has disclosed that over 93million Nigerians were engaged in permanent employment in the country. This claim was made in Lagos by the Special Adviser to the President on Economic Affairs, Dr. Tope Fasua, during the “2026 LCCI Mid-Year Economic Review and Outlook Conference,” which was organised by the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI). Fasua said that the unemployment rate in the country was overestimated because the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was not yet reporting emerging sources of employment in the country. He identified the emerging sources of employment as digital and remote work, content creators, comedians, solar techs, agents for real estates, make-up artists, despatch delivery riders, musicians. He estimated that agriculture employed between 20 million and 24 million Nigerians while the food and beverages segment of the economy employed about 7million workers. Fasua said: “So, these are people who are in permanent employment mostly,” and there are new sectors that are employing people like make-up artists in this country. “The NBS has no provision for anything like make-up artists. “There is no provision for digital and remote work in the NBS numbers. There is no provision because we are living in an old century. “Even things like content-creators, comedians, musicians. How many musicians, how many comedians? These guys are making loads of money. “So, we need to understand the fact of how the economy has changed from what we used to know. “My conclusion is that we had about 93 million people employed in this country permanently.” Fasua said that the focus of his research was to show that we forget many times that those sources of employment are existing and are employing people on a daily basis. He said: “Maybe not everyone is suffering in Nigeria as we often lament. “If 93 million are getting money every day or monthly for example. What that shows is that there is a chunk of Nigerians that are earning money. “We need to think about the economy in a more kaleidoscopic manner and not the doom scrolling in the social media gas.” Fasua said that when we talk about multidimensional poverty, we talk about hundreds of million people who are living in multidimensional poverty, which actually is low-income poverty that developing infrastructure could have a direct impact on thereby reducing that multidimensional poverty. The economic adviser also raised arguments against the federal government’s cash transfer scheme, arguing that Nigeria’s economy had not attained the level that should sustain such a scheme. He argued that the government should direct resources to agriculture to enable Nigeria to produce more food than it needs.
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