Years from now, Nigerians will come to remember 2016 as the year of the recession, when the economy took a nose dive as several investors pulled out of the Nigerian market, the rate of unemployment spiked, and the cost of commodities increased, not to mention the cut back in the amount of revenue coming into the country as the global price of oil dipped and militants wreaked havoc on oil production facilities in the Niger Delta.
When the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics released the unemployment rate for the second quarter of the year late August, it showed an increase from 12.1 percent in the first quarter to 13.3 percent at the end of the second quarter. Consequently, there was an increase in the population of the labour force from 78.5 million in the first quarter to 79.9 million at the end of the second quarter. These figures were barely surprising considering the massive retrenchments that took place in the banking, telco, and shipping industry in the first two quarters of the year.
As if things couldn’t get any worse, the rising cost of operation and production has forced some Nigerian newspapers to cut down on the number of staff in their newsrooms, according to a report by Premium Times.
The Punch, one of the largest employers in the media industry, is reported to have fired about 40 staff within the past week following a staff performance appraisal. “It’s true that they were dismissed, but not entirely because of the economic situation. We look at staff productivity like every year and those who didn’t meet up were many this year,” a source told Premium Times.
Meanwhile, at Leadership, there was a recommended 70 percent cut in staff strength, but the management thought it more expedient to convert some of their reporters to freelancers as opposed to a total layoff. Zipporah Tanko, the director of Human Capital of Leadership Newspaper, confirmed the latest development in her organisation saying, “It is true that we had to convert them to freelance, but this was even after a painstaking effort by the management. The recommendation we got was to dismiss around 70 percent of our staff and the management said that would be too draconian.” She further explained that the paper will reabsorb affected reporters as full staff once the economic crisis eases.
