The Nigerian labor unions have pointedly accused state governors of insensitivity and bad faith in the negotiations over a new minimum wage. The unions’ frustration follows the news that, while the federal government was willing to consider a minimum wage higher than N60,000, the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) opposed the proposal.
In a statement on Friday, Halimah Ahmed, the NGF’s Director of Media and Public Affairs, had argued on behalf of the governors that the proposed N60,000 minimum wage is too high and financially unsustainable for many state governments to pay. The governors contended that adopting such a wage would force states to allocate their entire Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) funds to salaries, leaving no resources for development projects.
TUC Reacts
But reacting to this on Saturday, the Labour union vehemently disagreed. They insisted that every aspect of the new minimum wage agreement should be implemented and suggested that governors unable to meet these obligations should resign. Tommy Etim, Deputy National President of the Trade Union Congress, said the governors were elected to govern comprehensively, not just focus on infrastructure at the expense of workers’ welfare.
Etim criticized the governors for not addressing these concerns during their election campaigns and accused them of exploiting the poor to gain power. He said it was ironic that governors deemed N30,000 too much to pay while many of them were accumulating vast sums of money in personal enrichment and that of cronies.
“There is no minimum wage. Every segment of it should be implemented. For the governors, we have said it very clearly. If you cannot pay minimum wage, please resign because you were voted for governance, not for only infrastructure.
“If you build the entire infrastructure and the people are not living to use it, who will use it? When they were campaigning, did they tell us that? They didn’t tell us that. They use the poor to get to the top, and when they get there, they start thinking outside the box. All the money they spent in electioneering campaigns, they should have applied that to build infrastructure, to develop the revenue generation that would have solved some socio-economic challenges in their domain,” Etim said.
NLC Agrees
The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), in a statement by its Head of Public Affairs, Benson Upah, echoed these sentiments, accusing the governors of bad faith. “As for the veracity of their claim, nothing can be further from the truth as FAAC allocations have since moved from N700bn to N1.2tn, making the governments extremely rich at the expense of the people.
“All that the governors need to do to be able to pay a reasonable national minimum wage (not even the N60,000) is cut on the high cost of governance, minimize corruption as well as prioritize the welfare of workers,” he said.
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