The Imperatives For New National Minimum Wage

By Dr. Benjamin Nwokdi, Alvan Ikoku Federal University Of Education, Owerri

According to the United Nations, any human being who lives on less than ten dollars a day is living below the poverty line.

Predicated on this measurement, most Nigerians, especially civil servants are obviously living in abject poverty as most of them live far below one dollar per day.

This reality explains why the immediate past President of America, Donald Trump, once aptly described Nigeria as “the poverty capital of the world’’.

It would have been expected that since this observation, the nation’s leaders would have read the handwriting on the wall and introduced pragmatic measures, policies, and programmes that would have ameliorated the ugly situation.

Nigerian workers are, thus, no doubt, extremely underpaid given the current outrageous cost of living, triggered by the sudden removal of fuel subsidy and floating of the naira with the attendant unprecedented inflationary trend and astronomical increase in prices of goods and services.

Given the unfortunate current predicament, it would have been expected that workers and pensioners in Nigeria, either public or private, should earn a comfortable salary, good enough to sufficiently cater for their family’s basic needs such as good feeding, clothing, payment of house rent and other bills, education for the children with relative ease.

Also, a car is a necessity rather than a luxury to facilitate movement especially to and from work, and perhaps, a little savings for the rainy day.

But this is not so; rather, Nigerian workers, pensioners, and the masses have merely been subjected and reduced to mere walking corpses.

It is against this background that the organized Labour and all affiliate unions demand a wage award that is commensurate with the present cost of living, which has become long overdue.

For the avoidance of doubt, what the masses of this country expect from the federal government now, more than ever before, is a reasonable increase in the salaries of workers and pensioners which will trickle down to the masses.

It is an incontrovertible fact that when workers are well paid, they become motivated and their propensity for integrity and higher productivity is guaranteed.

Moreover, when workers’ salaries and pensions are enhanced and promptly paid, it facilitates the effective circulation of money which would obviously facilitate economic rejuvenation, social stability, and poverty reduction.

It should be noted that no government, anywhere in the world, can lay claim to good governance, if most of its citizens wallow in abject poverty, despondency, and deteriorating standard of living.

The urgent fixing and immediate implementation of a new living national minimum wage for workers and pensioners with its corresponding consequential adjustments, as being presented by organized Labour is now.

This would be a pragmatic catalyst for alleviating the prevailing suffering of Nigerian workers as well as for averting the looming industrial crises in the country.

Edited By Grace Namiji