Menu

Nigeria’s job creation crisis story 15 Jul 2026

Credit for the data underpinning this analysis goes to Nairametrics, whose research team compiled workforce disclosures from the 2025 annual reports of Nigeria’s listed companies. What follows is based on that painstaking work.

The data shows that Dangote Cement remains the pre-eminent employer among companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX), with 21,418 employees. First Holdco Plc and United Bank for Africa follow at a distance, with 10,871 and 10,821 employees, respectively. The roster continues with Access Holdings at 9,960 and Julius Berger at 8,859. Zenith Bank reports a headcount of 8,773, while Guaranty Trust Holding Company reports a headcount of 6,122. Rounding out this top tier are Airtel Africa with 4,263 employees, Sterling Bank with 3,723 employees, and Fidelity Bank, which completes the list with 3,466 employees.

The top 10 NGX-listed employers collectively employed 88,276 people in 2025. I searched the data from the same source that Nairametrics used, and found that on average, these companies created 11,699 jobs a year between 2020 and 2024. Eleven thousand jobs. In a country with a labour force of 73 million people, where four million young Nigerians enter the job market every year, and where formal-sector job creation barely reaches 200,000 annually, this is an arithmetic of despair.

The official unemployment figure tells a different story. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced in 2024 that Nigeria’s unemployment rate had fallen to 4.3 per cent. That number looks enviable, but as the figures compiled by Nairametrics indicate, the reality is alarmingly different.

In late 2022, the NBS aligned its labour-force methodology with International Labour Organisation guidelines. Under the previous definition, which recorded 33.3 per cent unemployment in Q4 2020, anyone who worked at least 20 hours per week was considered employed. The new framework counts anyone who worked for at least one hour during the survey week as employed. That is not statistical chicanery; the revision brings Nigeria into line with global standards. But applying a universal metric to an economy where 93 per cent of jobs are informal creates what might charitably be called a measurement problem, or, less charitably, an illusion.

Consider what “employment” now encompasses: the woman selling plantain from the roadside in front of ValuXchange in Magodo, the okada rider taking you from the Shangisha Gate to Ketu, and the subsistence farmer whose entire productive capacity is defeated by a single dry season. As far as Nigeria is concerned, all are employed, and all are contributing to that enviable 4.3 per cent. Yet all of them are one emergency away from destitution.

This is not an accident of statistical method but rather politics. For the entire second term of Yemi Kale as the Statistician-General, the NBS was under political pressure to produce figures that would not embarrass the Buhari government. Throughout that time, unemployment was uncomfortably high, in double digits, and a double-digit rate for a government that wants to beat its chest ahead of elections is politically toxic. So the methodology was changed, and the problem disappeared on paper. But direct political interference in data to achieve predetermined outcomes has no good outcomes. The only thing it achieves is concealing a crisis, which is not the same as resolving it.

Nigeria adds roughly four million young people to its labour force each year. According to the data we explored, the top 10 listed companies combined create about 11,000 jobs annually. Even if every one of those jobs went to a new entrant, that would be a 0.275 per cent dent on unemployment.

The banks that dominate the top 10, seven of them in this list, are not employment engines. They are service-sector operations where technology increasingly replaces labour. Zenith Bank and GTCO, with roughly 8,700 and 6,100 employees, respectively, generate billions in profit with workforces that are a fraction of those of manufacturing firms. Airtel Africa employs 4,263 people across 14 African countries, a testament to productivity driven by infrastructure rather than labour intensity. Dangote Cement, the largest employer on the list, has a workforce driven by the physical demands of mining, production and distribution. But even there, 21,418 employees are a rounding error against the scale of Nigeria’s labour market.

The real economy is not the listed companies. It is 93 per cent of the workforce trapped in informal employment, hustling for survival without contracts, pensions, or a pathway to prosperity. That is not a labour market; it is a holding pen.

The banks that dominate the NGX have the capital to drive real economic transformation. S&P Global projected credit growth of 20-25 per cent in 2026, driven by investment in oil and gas, agriculture, and manufacturing. In theory, that capital could be deployed to expand productive capacity, create jobs, and take young people off the streets.

But theory and practice diverge sharply in Nigeria. Banks now earn 40 per cent of their interest income from government securities rather than from lending to businesses. The most recent Treasury Bill auction laid bare the disconnect: investors bid N4.4 trillion for securities worth only N800 billion, a staggering 400 per cent oversubscription. Manufacturers and agricultural operators face interest rates of up to 60 per cent. Small businesses pay five per cent per month (80 per cent per annum) to microfinance lenders because banks will not lend to them. Meanwhile, credit to private companies fell by three per cent last year, even as government borrowing jumped by 26 per cent.

This is not a liquidity problem but a prioritisation problem. Nigeria has liquidity, yet our banks have settled into a comfortable groove: lend to the government at 16 per cent with zero risk, collect guaranteed returns, and avoid the perceived risks of lending to businesses with thin profit margins. The result is a financial system that circulates money between the government and itself, while the productive economy is starved of funding.

For this to change, the banks must do two things simultaneously. First, they must invest directly in the real economy. Mandatory lending quotas, requiring perhaps 20 per cent of portfolios to go to manufacturing, agriculture and SMEs, could redirect capital where it is needed. Second, they must lobby the government for more effective regulations and the repeal of laws that hold business back.

An example of such a law is the Land Use Act of 1978. This 48-year-old military decree vests control of all land in each state in the governor. Obtaining a certificate of occupancy, perfecting land titles, or transferring property can take months or years. The cost of registration, consent fees, and stamp duties can amount to 15-30 per cent of the property value in some states. For a business seeking to expand, build a factory, or secure collateral for a loan, these costs and delays are prohibitive. The Land Use Act was never an economic enabler; it has always been a barrier to prosperity. The banks, which should be the most vocal advocates for its reform, have largely been silent.

The link between unemployment and insecurity is empirically established. The Federation of Informal Workers Organisations of Nigeria has warned that rising poverty, unemployment and social exclusion are fuelling kidnappings and banditry across the country. The organisation argued that the growing number of unemployed and socially unprotected youths has created fertile ground for criminal recruitment and violent extremism.

Funny enough, the military, which did so much to create this mess, agrees. The Commander of Sector 2, Operation HADIN KAI, Brigadier General Martins, said that military action accounts for only about 30 per cent of the overall response to insecurity. The remaining 70 per cent depends on effective governance, infrastructure, education, and economic opportunities. “If states have thriving industries and factories,” he said, “young people will be engaged productively instead of being available for recruitment by Boko Haram, bandits or kidnappers.”

That is the core of the matter. The top 10 listed companies cannot solve Nigeria’s unemployment crisis; they are too small. But they are not irrelevant. They are the visible peak of a formal sector that could, with the right policy environment and the right capital allocation, expand to absorb a meaningful fraction of the 4 million young Nigerians entering the labour force each year.

The banks have the capital and the expertise. They also have the incentive, since a stable, prosperous country is better for business than one where armed gangs kidnap schoolchildren for ransom. What they lack is the willingness to deploy that capital in the real economy and the political will to demand the reforms that would make such deployment profitable and safe.

The 2025 workforce disclosures show what is possible. The 88,276 jobs created by the top 10 companies demonstrate what the formal sector can achieve. But they also reveal how far Nigeria still has to go. When 73 million people are in the labour force, four million new entrants arrive each year, and armed groups recruit from the ranks of the unemployed, the cost of inaction is measured not only in economic statistics but in lives.

Cheta Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence.