After weeks of rigorous negotiations and horse trading, the President Bola Tinubu-led administration and organised labour reached an agreement for a new national minimum wage of N70,000 in July from existing N30,000.
Although widely adjudged as inadequate in the face of current economic realities, the new wage offers a glimmer of hope for Nigerian workers to fight back the widespread suffering and pain brought by government’s ill-advised fiscal policies, which triggered exchange rate crisis and unbridled wave of inflation.
However, despite signing the new minimum wage into law since July 29, the government has remained hesitant on implementation till date, as public and private employees helplessly cool their heels in uncertain expectation.
While some have excused government’s agonising delay as part of the process of “consequential adjustments” to reflect the pay rise in all cadres of its employ, we maintain that the apparent lack of commitment towards immediate enforcement of the new wage law undermines the urgency of easing the widespread suffering caused by high cost of living and a prolonged double digit inflation.
Our suspicion of government’s hesitation is with recourse to precedence. When the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari raised the minimum wage from N18,000 to N30,000 in 2019, the implementation was immediate and swift.
Between July when the new wage became law and now, Lagos and Edo have indicated commencement of implementation. Other states such as Kano, Kwara, Ogun, Borno, Jigawa, Ondo, and Abia are said to have set up implementation committees.
However, states like Plateau, Kebbi, Sokoto, Nasarawa, Bayelsa, Delta, Osun, Ekiti, Zamfara, Benue, Enugu, Taraba, Gombe, Kogi, Enugu, Adamawa, Niger, Anambra, Imo, Ebonyi, Oyo, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Katsina, Kaduna, Cross River, Yobe and others have indicated willingness to pay but are yet to raise implementation committees.
While federal government and majority of states are still dilly dallying over the implementation, workers’ patience is gradually overstretched and waning by unrelenting pressure from skyrocketing food prices, transportation and housing.
As a country at the centre of a poverty epidemic with majority of its population living below $2 a day, issues of workers’ welfare should not only be considered a right but also an avenue to curb rising poverty, and therefore be treated with dispatch to allow the positive impact trickle down.
Earlier, when government ostensibly prolonged negotiations on the wage increment in spite of grueling economic hardship, it inadvertently displayed a pattern of insensitivity common with public office holders to the plight of the average Nigerian worker, who bears the brunt of experimental government policies and the high cost of living.
That pattern of indifference remains unchallenged and regrettably emboldened by the failure to act with urgency in matters that could be construed as pertaining life and death, such as earnings of workers.
It makes no moral sense, therefore, to threaten the organised private sector with a warning that paying any worker less than N70,000 is a disruption of the law and thus a crime, when government itself has not commenced payment of the minimum wage it passed into law.
Government should lead by example before tasking private employment agencies on ensuring that employment contracts include a clause guaranteeing workers earn at least the minimum wage, after deductions, to ensure fair compensation for employees either in the public or private sector.
