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Fashola Picks Errors In Nigeria’s Minimum Wage Structure

Published

6 months ago

Jun 14, 2024.

This Is Why Tinubu Is Fuming – Babatunde Fashola

By Kunle Aremu

The Nigeria’s constitution has provided room for the review of national minimum wage but it seems the organised labour unions and those representing the Federal Government do not actually understand the context of that law.

This was the import of the argument of the former Lagos State Governor Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN) at a forum to mark the Democracy Day.

EDITOR’S PICK

To Fashola, there is a difference between salary and wage, adding, “the stakeholders and those involved in the tripartite meetings over the new minimum wage should define this clearly for the members of the public to know.”

Fashola who writes on page 88 of his recent book, “Nigeria Public Discourse: The Interface of Empirical Evidence, Hyperbole”, argues that Nigeria operates a salary structure and not a wage structure.

According to him, a wage is the money paid to a worker per hour while salary is money paid to a worker at the end of a month, which of course should be well stated by the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress in their quest to commit the government to pay minimum wage.

Fashola

He debated that while Nigeria operates a salary structure, the constitution speaks about wage structure not the salary structure without spelling out the hours and how much to pay within those hours to a worker.

Fashola explained that if truly the NLC and the government must address the issue of minimum wage, they must first divide the N30,000 by 52 and then by 40 to arrive at about N173 per hour as the true minimum wage for a Nigerian worker.

He stated that he would create time to push this at every forum and perhaps let the lawmakers know that there are still a lot of job to be done over what is called minimum wage or minimum salary.

As he put it, “The present arrangement means that the new minimum wage after legislation and assent by the president will raise the salary of all civil servants from the lowest cadre to the highest, that is the Permanent Secretary level”.

“This shouldn’t be because the minimum wage should not be measured in months but hours,” he noted.

There have been rumours that the tripartite committee agreed on N62,000, which the NLC had since refuted, saying that it had never agreed on a particular amount as minimum wage.

The President of the NLC, Joe Ajaero said that the labour had come down from over N600,000 to N400,000 and the latest is N250,000 as minimum wage. He said that the union would not agree with the government’s N62,000.

During his national broadcast to mark Democracy Day, President Bola Tinubu told the nation that his government would soon send an executive bill on minimum wage to the National Assembly for legislation.

He said that the tripartite committee had agreed on a particular amount, which he did not disclose and that the legislators would begin to work on the executive bill soon.

Reacting to the speech, NLC president, Ajaero called on President Tinubu to engage the labour leaders before assenting the bill to law, saying that the union had not agreed on a particular amount.