Zimbabwe state bureaucrats on Monday said unemployment in the country stood at a comfortable 9% as late as 2004, totally rejecting independent estimates that joblessness surpassed the 50% mark several years ago and is at present anything above 70%.
In its 2004 Labour Force Surveyreleased in Harare, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) said 87% of the employable age group of 15 years and above was economically active, leaving only 9% without a job during the period under review.
The government data agency said: “Population age 15 years and above, considered to be the working age population, accounted for 60% of the population.
“Out of the population age 15 years and above, 87% was economically active. Using the broad definition of unemployment, 9% was unemployed.”
The 9% that was economically inactive or unemployed represented 529 000 people, most of them youths, according to the CSO.
The CSO said unemployment was highest among youths with a high-school education and residing in urban areas.
The total population for the 2004 labour survey was estimated at 10,8-million compared with the 11,6-million people counted in the 2002 population census, which suggests the CSO may have factored in the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans who leave the country every year in search of jobs in neighbouring countries or overseas.
While many professionals leave their jobs to seek better paying posts abroad, many ordinary Zimbabweans leave simply because they cannot find formal employment in an economy that in the past seven years has experienced the world’s worst recession outside a war zone.
At least three million Zimbabweans are said to be living and working outside the country and will certainly be among multitudes of people, including many economic experts, who will find the CSO’s unemployment figures hard to buy.
The CSO said of the 5,1-million people that were employed in 2004, 196 000 were in time-related underemployment.
Time-related under-employment in the survey was defined as all those employed persons aged 15 years and above, involuntarily working less than 40 hours a week, who were seeking or available for additional work during the one-week reference period.
The CSO said that 193 000 persons were at least once retrenched from a previous job in the period 1995 to May 2004.
Information from the survey will be used to formulate policies on employment, human resources development strategies, macroeconomic monitoring, income support and social programmes.
Once one of Africa’s best prospects of economic success, Zimbabwe has grappled a severe economic and food crisis since 2000, which critics blame on repression and wrong policies by President Robert Mugabe, such as his farm-seizure programme that destabilised the mainstay agricultural sector.
Zimbabwe’s crisis has manifested itself through acute shortages of foreign currency, fuel and food, while the rate of inflation is above 900% with economic analysts predicting the key rate to shoot beyond 1 000% when figures for April are announced on Wednesday. — ZimOnline