Labour is at it again! Our problem is more fundamental than just salary increase Organised labour missed the point on Thursday when the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) president, Ayuba Wabba, led other labour unionists to the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, to bare their minds on certain burning national issues, including the bogus pay our lawmakers earn, minimum wage review and sundry other matters. Although the labour leaders were right when they said that the lawmakers themselves constituted drain pipes, considering what they take home, but they failed to call the lawmakers pay the proper name it should be called, i.e. corruption, given the steady rise their allocation has been witnessing, from about N23.347billion in 2003 to its current N150billion; and in spite of the downturn in the countrys economy. And, despite the fact that minimum wage in the country has remained at the paltry N18,000 per month since 2010! Can anything be more callous and ungodly? Anyway, I wont waste too much time on that because a lot has been said on it and we should be awaiting the review of the National Assembly budget that Senator Saraki promised when the issue took the front burner of national discourse
a few weeks ago. We will always return to that again in full force if mum continues to be the word from him, in the usual expectation that Nigerians would soon forget the issue. My concern today is Labours notice to the senate president to the effect that it would soon come with a new National Minimum Wage proposal which the congress wants the senate to quickly approve in view of the countrys present economic realities. The NLC seemingly has a point to want to push for an upward review of the present minimum wage because if salary is expected to take people home, it has since failed in that regard. A time there was when Fela sang that 20 kobo bean cake was too small (akara nko, 20 kobo for one; na janjala e be); these days, I doubt if there is anything like that, not even in the rural areas. Moreover, at the current exchange rate of N242 to the dollar, the average Nigerian worker earns about $75 in a month, just a little more than $2 a day. Pray, what can anyone do with this? Yet, we
dont want people to steal. Yet, we want people to put in their best. Are we not deceiving ourselves?  I sympathise with Labour on this matter, especially given its unassailable reasons to justify its position. As a matter of fact, too, I do not expect any member of the National Assembly with conscience to raise issues even if Labour eventually comes up with a N50,000 monthly minimum wage proposal for approval. In the first place, this is a figure that workers had been clamouring for all these years. Moreover, that would only amount to N600,000 per annum, which is about N100,000 more than our National Assembly law makers spend on clothes alone per year! But, jokes apart, asking for a new minimum wage is not the answer to the question posed by the Nigerian economy. When the present N18,000 was secured in 2010, it was well celebrated. Then, it never occurred to anyone that our National Assembly law makers would get more than double that amount as wardrobe allowance in a month. Then, no one thought the naira would be so devalued that it would now be exchanging at N242 to a US dollar, up from the N140 it was in 2010 when the now moribund N18,000 minimum wage was implemented. A quick travel down the memory lane on minimum wage reviews in the country will suffice to buttress my point. By the 2000 National Minimum Wage (Amendment Act), minimum wage was pegged at N7,500 for Federal Government workers (and N5,500 for state government workers). This was raised to N18,000 in 2010. So, within a period of just 10 years, our minimum wage had more than tripled. And this has been the pattern since 1981 when the minimum wage was N125 per month; it rose to N250 as a result of the Minimum Wage Amendment Decree 1990. Ten years later, it had ballooned to N7,500. The implication is that between 1981 and 2015, minimum wage in the country had jumped from N125 to N18,000! I am yet to see any good country with that paradigm. For example, when National Minimum Wage was
first introduced in Britain in 1999, it was pegged at 3.60 pounds per hour. Between 1999 and now, a period of 16 years, it has increased only by 3.30 pounds per hour. Indeed, when salaries
are increased in many other places, it is not as ridiculous as ours and the workers are far better off. Not so in Nigeria. Without doubt, the situation here concerning the astronomical rise in minimum wage over the years tells us that the problem is not about asking for high wage. It is much more fundamental. This is what the NLC should be in the vanguard of unravelling (assuming it does not yet know why) and clamouring for its correction. What successive increases in wages has done is to enable the politicians (whether those in military uniform or their civilian counterparts) to keep deceiving Nigerians and giving them the impression that all is well because, as soon as the workers get the salary increase, they jubilate. But when they get to the market a few weeks or months later, they discover that the money has further lost its value. I still remember what I was able to do with my N96 monthly allowance as a youth corps member in 1985. Those on national service now cannot boast of same despite the fact that they earn by far more. Even for the brief period I worked with my School Certificate result, I know the things I was able to do with my salary of about N110 per month. Todays graduates who are lucky to have jobs are groaning because the wads of naira notes in their pockets can hardly buy anything of substance. My fear is that, at the rate at which we are going, a time will come when we would have to carry money in Ghana-must- go bags to buy an average loaf of bread as is the case in Mugabes Zimbabwe which I guess must be brimming with trillionaires! Therefore, what Nigerians should be clamouring
for is good governance. Without good governance, we are only going to be wasting our time moving in circles, irrespective of the frequency of periodic reviews of minimum wage, or the magnitude. If we had done the needful in this regard, especially in the immediate past, this country would not be where it is today. If we had been alive to our responsibilities as Nigerians, we would not have had the kind of corrupt government that brought our economy to its knees as the Goodluck Jonathan government did, without giving it any serious fight until the general elections. Perhaps Labours thinking by insisting on new minimum wage all the time is that this would mop up some of the surplus money that public officials steal. If that is the reasoning, we must have seen it has not worked. As a matter of fact, the public officials might grandstand and make negotiations for minimum wage tedious and laborious; they would be more worried the moment they see that the critical segments of the society are clamouring for good governance because that alone is the antidote to the massive looting of our treasury that has become our lot over the decades. My fear however is whether Labour itself is not complicit in the situation we find ourselves because if it had been doing what it should do to call the countrys leaders to order, things would not have been this bad. The other problem is the state of the labour union itself; recent revelations on its housing scheme, its transport scheme and NLCs last election which almost reflected our national elections are enough cause for concern as to whether the congress can provide the desired leadership to take us out of the woods.