N70,000 minimum wage: Protecting the inconsequential majority 

Last week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the new Minimum Wage Bill into law while commending the National Assembly for prompt passage of the bill. The federal government and the organised labour recently agreed on N70,000 as Nigeria’s new minimum wage. The president promptly forwarded the bill to the National Assembly and demanded swift passage.

The new minimum wage is a record 134 per cent increase on the previous minimum wage of N30,000. It would be reviewed every three years.

Labour entered the negotiations with a seemingly unattainable figure of N615,000 as minimum wage. The federal government responded with a ridiculous figure of N45,000 which prompted labour to walk out of the negotiation.

When the federal government clung tenaciously to its figure, the unions called out workers on a strike that shocked government as it took down Nigeria’s feeble national power grid and halted crude oil exports within 24 hours. That was the first time the current leadership of labour organised such an effective strike.

Government pleaded with labour to return to the negotiating table and it did. About two months after the showdown, the two parties agreed on N70,000 as new minimum wage, even as none of the negotiators got what it wanted. The new minimum wage was the outcome of intricate mutual compromise on the part of the negotiators.

The organised labour was determined to squeeze out of the federal government not just a new minimum wage but something that could be seen as a living wage. 

The federal government, on its part, was bent on getting a new minimum wage that the economy with its abysmal productivity can sustain.

At the end of the grueling negotiations, the two parties grudgingly accepted a figure detested by their followers. It was a clear indication on the part of the negotiators that compromise is not the synonym of surrender. They compromised without any sense of surrendering.

With food inflation surging along at 40.8 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released figures on the cost of a healthy diet per person per day that showed that N1,041 was needed to provide a healthy meal per day for one person.

The NBS figure which was released a few days before the agreement on N70,000 as new minimum wage was reached, lent credence to labour leaders’ demand for N250,000 as new minimum wage. It showed that more than N31,000 was needed for feeding one person in a month.

However, the labour leaders were convinced that with the abysmal productivity in the economy, a minimum wage of N250,000 could devastate the economy. 

They grudgingly accepted N70,000 even as they knew that it bordered on starving wage.

The federal government, on its part, was under pressure from state governors and the organised private sector to accept a minimum wage of N55,000. What government accepted as compromise figure was so far from the demand of the governors and captains of industry that the federal government promised to assist them to pay the new minimum wage. 

N70,000 as new minimum wage was therefore a classic case of “no victor, no vanquished”. The negotiators made tremendous sacrifices.

Weeks after the new minimum wage was fixed, at least two state governors and a number of private firms had complained bitterly that they cannot implement it. 

The federal government’s promise to assist them to implement the new minimum wage may eventually fill the financial void that might militate against implementation of what actually was the product of mutual compromise. 

Blueprint commends labour and the federal government for the dexterity, flexibility and compromise that suffused the negotiation. We enjoin the president to ensure strict implementation of the law.

The new minimum wage would directly benefit just 5.3 million workers in a workforce of 76 million. Well over 71 million people in Nigeria’s unwieldy informal sector have no way of benefitting from the new minimum wage.

They include thousands of graduates toiling for a paltry monthly pay of N15,000 in hundreds of pocket-size private schools.

We urge the federal government to rescue the inconsequential majority in Nigeria’s workforce from the merciless grip of poverty by waging a relentless war against inflation.

That requires taming the high energy cost escalating the cost of evacuating food items from Nigeria’s inaccessible rural farming communities to the markets in urban slums.

Besides, the obdurate war between herdsmen and crop farmers must end. As Nigeria toils to switch to mechanised farming, the wings of the bandits terrorising peasant farmers out of the fields must be clipped permanently.