I just read that the Nigeria Labour Congress is asking for sixty eight thousand, five hundred naira only as the new monthly minimum wage.
This would appear as a remarkable leap given the current figure of eighteen thousand naira only, which is in every sense, a slave wage.
The current minimum wage reminds me of labour’s popular slogan ‘my take home pay cannot take me home’.
What we need is a wage reward system that is not just about increase in figures but a wage system that guarantees internationally competitive purchasing power parity. What can our minimum wage provide for the workers? That is the main issue.
My friends who studied economics have taught me to appreciate that devaluation of currency and fuel price manipulation can make two hundred thousand naira become as worthless as one thousand naira.
We have observed the Breton Woods Institutions; World Bank and IMF, impose conditionalities on Nigeria that include deregulation of downstream sector and devaluation of the naira.
As we have also observed, governments have relied on these policies to sustain the payment of wages in Nigeria.
We note with bitterness that wages fixed in 2009 when the naira exchanged for less than two hundred naira to a dollar is still being paid to workers at a time the naira is exchanging for nearly four hundred naira to a dollar.
I causally told a German last week that as a Professor, my monthly earning is barely one thousand Euros. He exclaimed “how can that be the case? Professors in Germany earn between five thousand and ten thousand Euros”.
My slave wage is part of the politics of minimum wage in Nigeria.
The challenge before the Nigeria labour Congress is not just securing increase in minimum wage but actually to protect the gained wage increase from ruin through policies dangerous to real income stability.
For the records, Mexico has a minimum wage of $4.5 per hour. That translates to $45 per day of ten hours work. In a month of 22days of work, we have $990. At an exchange rate of N360 to $1, we have N356, 400 as minimum wage in Mexico.
What looks like huge increase from N18000 to N68500 by international average is still within the slave wage bracket. This fact complicates the minimum wage politics in Nigeria.
Two questions need our attention at this point; how come wages are so poor in Nigeria? and what can we do about the situation?
Maybe, the inability to find the right answers to the above questions really explains the persistence of slave wages in Nigeria.
A simplistic attempt to address the questions points to:
1. Low productivity sufficient to drive high wages. The size of an economy that can drive high wages can easily be projected.
2. GDP to population size is pointing to doom. Resources sufficient for 50m people in modern States is catering for 180m Nigerians.
3. Non industrial economy weighing the wage system down.
The above responses amount to nothing when we look at the political roots of the wage crisis in Nigeria:
1. The political structure from federal government to local government structure defines and impose an expenditure pattern that suffocates high wages.
We hear government and Breton Woods Institutions lament the high recurrent expenditure, lamenting high recurrent expenditure pattern that provides for only slave wages.
2. Wasteful government expenditure in all sectors of the economy. This cannot be resolved until we restructure Nigeria’s political economy.
The impact of slave wages is worse in the education sector. Maybe, we should add the public civil servants.
The informal sector housing Nigeria’s largest population of the poor suffers consequential negative impact of poor public sector wages.
We must realize that decent wages have multiplier effects in a society but they are planned for.
There is no reason to believe that Nigeria Labour Congress or government is prepared to take the bull by the horn in resolving the minimum and slave wages in Nigeria.
Finally, it is sickening to see increasing social conflicts and violence arising from either zero wages or slave wages.
Maybe, we need to take a new look at the wage dilemma confronting the country.
