By Ayomikun Idowu
A Nigerian can drive for a ride-hailing platform in the morning, sell products through Instagram in the afternoon and complete an online assignment for a foreign client at night.
So what does that person do for a living?
The honest answer is: several things.
But in official statistics, the answer may be much simpler. Self-employed.
That description may be correct, but it does not tell us much about how the person actually works. It does not tell us where the income comes from, whether one platform controls access to customers, how stable the earnings are or whether some of the work is being sold to clients outside Nigeria.
This is becoming a real problem.
The structure of work in Nigeria is changing faster than the categories we use to describe it.
The National Bureau of Statistics reported that 93 per cent of employment was informal in the second quarter of 2024. It also reported that 85.6 per cent of employed Nigerians were self-employed, while unemployment stood at 4.3 per cent.
Those numbers matter. But they also hide a lot.
Take two people who are both described as self-employed.
One is a tailor who owns a small shop, sets her prices and deals directly with customers. The other is a ride-hailing driver whose access to customers, fares and continued work depends heavily on a digital platform.
Same category. Very different working lives.
Or take two graphic designers. One serves businesses in Lagos. The other works from Ibadan for clients in Britain, Canada and the United States.
Again, both may be freelancers. But one is working mainly in the domestic economy while the other is effectively exporting services.
If we count both simply as self-employed, we have counted the workers. We have not really understood what they are doing.
We are counting workers, but missing how they work
This is not to say that Nigeria’s labour statistics measure nothing beyond employment status. The Labour Force Survey already asks about main and secondary jobs, working hours, occupation and earnings.
The problem is that the headline categories are becoming too broad for the way people now make a living.
Digital technology has made it much easier to combine several kinds of work.
A teacher may run an online retail business after work. A civil servant may design websites at weekends. A graduate may combine ride-hailing, freelance writing and social-media marketing while looking for a salaried job.
For many Nigerians, work is becoming less like one job and more like a portfolio of income sources.
That matters because a person’s “main job” may not tell us where the real opportunity or risk lies.
Imagine someone who spends most of the week running a small local business but earns more money from occasional software contracts with clients abroad. Which activity best describes that person’s place in the economy?
Or a driver who works across three ride-hailing apps. Is that one job? Three sources of income? Platform work? Self-employment?
These questions may sound technical, but they affect real policy choices.
Someone whose income comes from several sources will not need the same financial products as a salaried worker with a fixed monthly income.
A driver who depends on one platform for most of his earnings faces a different kind of risk from a trader with hundreds of customers.
A freelancer may earn a reasonable income over the course of a year and still struggle to get a loan because the money comes in unevenly.
If we do not see these differences, we will keep designing one policy for workers who live very different economic lives.
Remote work creates another blind spot.
When a Nigerian copywriter produces content for a Canadian company, an accountant manages the books of an American business or a developer builds software for a British client, that person is not simply “working online”.
Nigeria is exporting a service.
Yet we rarely talk about these workers as exporters.
We call them freelancers, tech workers or young people earning online. That misses something important. They are selling Nigerian skills into international markets and bringing foreign income into the country.
We need to know much more about this group.
How many Nigerians earn from foreign clients? What services are they selling? Which countries are buying them? How much income are they bringing in? Is the work occasional or sustained?
Without that information, we do not really know where Nigeria is already becoming competitive in digital services.
And that should matter for skills policy.
Government can train thousands of people in coding, design, data analysis or digital marketing. But training numbers do not tell us whether people are finding work.
If Nigerians are already earning strongly in particular areas, that should shape what we teach and where support goes.
If the real problems are getting paid, proving income or enforcing contracts, then more training will not solve them.
Training people for digital work without knowing where the work is actually coming from is a poor way to build a labour market.
Measure the economy Nigerians are actually building
Nigeria does not need to throw away its existing labour statistics. It needs to make digital work more visible inside them.
A few extra questions could tell us a lot.
Does the person get customers or assignments through a digital platform? Are the clients mainly in Nigeria or abroad? How many platforms or clients provide income? What share comes from the biggest source? Is the work the person’s main livelihood or something done on the side?
Those questions would help us distinguish different types of self-employment without creating a completely new statistical system.
They would also help clear up the way we talk about the “gig economy”.
At the moment, that label can include ride-hailing drivers, delivery workers, online freelancers, remote professionals and people doing occasional jobs through apps.
But these people do not work in the same way.
Some depend on algorithms for access to work. Others negotiate directly with clients. Some earn locally. Others earn foreign currency. Some use platform work to supplement another income. For others, it is the main thing keeping the household going.
One big number for the gig economy would tell us very little.
What we need to understand is how people get work, where their income comes from and how dependent they are on the platforms or clients through which they earn.
That information would be useful far beyond labour statistics.
Employment programmes could see where people are actually finding work. Skills programmes could respond to real demand. Export agencies could start recognising independent digital workers as service exporters. Banks and other lenders could design products for people with irregular but verifiable income. Social-protection systems could better reflect workers who move between salaried work, self-employment and platform work.
Right now, government tends to treat employment, enterprise, exports, taxation and social protection as separate policy areas.
Workers do not experience them that way.
A remote freelancer can be a worker, a small business and an exporter in the same transaction.
A ride-hailing driver may be called self-employed while depending heavily on one platform for access to work.
A social-media seller may look informal from the outside while running a business with customers across several states.
The categories are not useless. They are simply becoming too blunt.
Nigeria has improved the way it measures employment. The next step is to understand how work itself is changing.
Platform workers should not disappear inside a broad category of self-employment. Remote workers serving foreign clients should not disappear inside general measures of informal work. And people combining several digital income sources should not be understood only by whichever activity happens to be listed as their main job.
We need to know more than how many Nigerians are working.
We need to know how they are actually making a living.
