Government exists to protect the interest of all and, may be focused on the interest of the majority of citizens. The majority of Nigerians are workers; they work for the government and the private sector. Thus, labour rights and issues need to be of paramount concern to government. But in Nigeria, labour issues are related to the background and treated with levity and scorn by a leadership that is not in touch with the reality of the majority who they claim elected them.
We have a constitution that prescribes uniform salaries and remuneration for key political office holders across the nation, irrespective of the size and revenue available to the states where they come from. They must take their perks irrespective of reason and evidence-led determination of their official income. However, for workers, the N30,000 national minimum wage has run into a crisis in so many states, with many of the states claiming inability to pay. They can afford to pay political office holders but cannot pay workers. This is a paradox and such a proposition for its continuation presents a time bomb which no one knows the timing of its explosion.
Beyond their allowances and perks as approved by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, the leadership still can approve all manner of illegal but officially legalised perks, allowances for themselves through “authority stealing” and abuse of office which manifests in illegal appropriations. Further, beyond “authority stealing”, public office holders still engage in brazen stealing for which they should appropriately be investigated, prosecuted, and sent to jail. However, every institution has been compromised reminiscent of the biblical mark of the beast where you can neither sow nor reap unless you have that mark of the beast on your forehead.
The proposition for the deregulation of the minimum wage, to take it away from the Exclusive Legislative List and allow each state to determine their wage structure based on available resources and ability to pay, on the surface of it, looks like a good one. But this can only be a good proposal where there are reasonable men and women in positions of leadership. Leaders who lead by the power of their example and not hypocrites who ask the people to do what they say and not what they do. Furthermore, the constitution, by its security and welfare fundamentals, expects a common minimum wage across the federation. The minimum wage is the minimum core obligation the employer through the mandate of the state owes its workers. It is the minimum core content of the right to work under favourable and satisfactory conditions prescribed by various international standards to which Nigeria is a signatory. It is not the maximum payable and every employer in a position to pay more has a further obligation to move beyond the minimalist N30,000 a month level.
Thus, the position of this discourse is that the minimum wage cannot be left for states to determine because the leadership of states have shown political immaturity and extreme insensitivity to the rights and sensitivities of their citizens. If the argument is about the resources available to states and ability to pay, are rich states like Lagos, Rivers and Delta paying more to their civil servants beyond the minimum wage? Have they all cleared the backlog of pensions and allowances due to civil servants? We are all living witnesses to what happens in the private sector where blue-chip and big money-making companies pay more than others and there is always a rush among applicants to get employed in these companies. Even at the federal level, there is always a rush for employment in such agencies like Federal Inland Revenue Service, Customs and Excise and the Central Bank of Nigeria, because of the resources available to them as they pay more than other federal agencies. So, why are the states different as they refuse to play by the book of evidence, reason and conscience?
The other issue is that even the N30,000 minimum wage is a death wage and not even a survival wage. Who can run a family of a wife, husband and four children prescribed by the National Population Policy on N30,000 a month? The value of the minimum wage is the greatest joke of the century. It can hardly buy a bag of rice and cannot pay the high electricity tariffs as well as the revised cost of transport based on the extant price petroleum products. Very soon, both the electricity tariff and the petroleum price will be upwardly reviewed, yet, the review of the minimum wage is not even on the cards. Labour in Nigeria is extremely cheap and does not attract the wage needed to reproduce it and allow it to continue to be producing profits for the exploitation of the few.
There is a way forward. Labour should resist this minimum wage deregulation idea; instead, they should insist on a national minimum wage even if the political office holders scrap their own across the board uniform wage. The United States of America which we follow as an example has not scrapped the minimum wage idea even though they do not have a uniform remuneration for all political office holders. The minimum wage challenge – from its inadequacy and the claim by some states on their inability to pay- is a product of mis/malgovernance. They are products of allowing our worst to assume leadership positions based on religious and ethnic considerations.
Going forward, the organised labour should become more evidence-led and constitute like-minded intellectuals and empirical minds to challenge the foundations of ill-conceived anti people and labour policies. But this should go along with a caveat that pragmatism is needed in terms of a changing world, changing solutions and lessons learnt from our experience and those of other climes like Nigeria. There should be no dogmatism except for foundational principles; interrogation of policies based on evidence that will lead to the evolution of a progressive Nigerian way of solving national challenges need to evolve because there is no one-size-fits all. This “no one-size-fits-all” principle is applicable to both neoliberal and labour principles. There is the need to come out of the trenches on both sides for the handshake and engagement that is based on empirical facts and reason.
Organised labour should become more proactive and engage beyond the minimum wage and core labour issues. In these days of anti-intellectual, ethnic and religiously inclined leadership at the federal level, labour can lead in providing new policy directions for wealth creation, appropriation of resources through the budget and policy implementation, etc.
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