What President Tinubu Must Do About Salaries And Wages

By Jesutega Onokpasa

Apart from low local production and high importation, the biggest problem with the Nigerian economy are low salaries and utterly meaningless wages.

In this dear country of ours, we just love nothing better than to pay one another utter pittances as fees, salaries, wages and commissions.

By far the best and most reliable remunerator of labour, which, as far as I am concerned, is, by far, the most important factor of production, is government, which still actually only ends up paying starvation wages when you factor in cost of living.

The “organised” private sector is even more disgraceful when it comes to remuneration and simply regularly breaks the labour laws without fear of any legal retribution.

Worst of all is the “unorganized” private sector, by far the largest and therefore most important employer of labour in our country.

Workers in this sector, from farm hands to “housegirls”, gatemen, drivers, secretaries, waiters and numberless other categories of effectively UNDOCUMENTED workers are little better than serfs if not glorified slaves from a “take home pay” point of view.

Joe Ajaero and his rabble-rousing ilk at the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC and Trade Union Congress, TUC, are so pitiably incompetent and unschooled in the craft of unionism they purport to be champions of that they don’t even realize that their number one role is the unionisation of the non-unionised rather than the imbecilic antics they keep veering into while only ending up miserably playing to the gallery and achieving absolutely nothing for Nigerian workers.

“Produce, produce, produce!” has been my clarion call for long now, as the solution to the exchange rate challenge and its runaway effect.

But the problem we face is actually, and obviously, more complicated than that.

I am not sorry to say this: we can be rather very wicked people to one another in this country.

We expect and demand fair and sane salaries, wages, prices and income for ourselves from our employers, customers and clients but will not replicate the same when it comes to our employees.

In the current insanity of inflation whereby vendors, service providers and producers ever eagerly mark up prices, hardly any entrepreneur or employer of labour has seen fit to increase the wages of their workers side by side with their obsession with constantly increasing the prices of their goods and services.

Most people have increased the prices of their goods and services to the point of doubling, if not tripling, them, since this time last year; hardly anyone remembered that labour is by far the most important component of the cost of production and that they ought to have increased salaries in the wake of inflation.

If anyone in Nigeria is dreaming of prices coming down, I wish them good luck.

I am not that old, neither that young, and in the years Our Lord has given me, thus far, apart from President Yar’Adua briefly reducing pump price of petrol, I have never seen prices come down in all the decades I have lived in this country!

May God help us but I don’t see prices reducing anytime soon.

What we can therefore insist on is what the law already compels.

A worker deserves his or her wages.

Indeed, may those who deny those who work for them the just remuneration for their labour have their interface with God.

Perhaps the most utterly useless Ministry in Nigeria is the Federal Ministry of Labour.

Over the years its Ministers and superintendents seem to have seen their role as milking dry subsidiary organs such as the National Social Investment Trust Fund, NSITF; otherwise, they seem perfectly satisfied to negotiate with the the NLC, or its affiliate, the Academic Staff Union Of Universities, ASUU and think they have discharged the obligation of their office!

The mandate of the Ministry of Labour is the protection of the Nigerian worker.

The mandate of the Attorney General of the Federation and the Federal Ministry of Justice is to enforce all laws including the labour laws.

When last did anyone hear of anyone being jailed for underpaying or howsoever cheating, or shortchanging, their worker?

Government at all tiers must increase salaries – low federal allocation and all that balderdash is no excuse; it is for the federation and the states to know how to raise revenue and if you can’t do that, sorry but you’re a pathetic excuse for a governor.

All “organised” private sector employers must be compelled to obey the labour law and pay living wages and salaries to their workers; if you won’t, please feel free to do your work yourself!

This is the tough one: the government must construct a mechanism for ensuring that those in the “unorganized” private sector are similarly paid lawful and LIVING WAGES and must be prepared to take never before seen measures in this country to secure the same.

Salaries and wages are the one factor of production that cannot legitimately be merely a function of demand and supply – they have to be a socioeconomic construct imposed and effectuated by law.

I am a lawyer and evidence is my religion; there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there is a shortage of food in our dear country neither a shortage of cash to purchase same.

The diabolical conundrum we are faced with is the absurdity of way too much cash in the hands of a few who don’t seem to know what to do with it and way too little of it in the hands of the generality of our citizens who need it to buy food and pay for essential services.

I’m sure President Bola Tinubu, being the son of the incomparably grassrooted Abibat Mogaji of blessed memory, would instinctively appreciate the compelling import of such an utterly unworkable paradigm.

Prices have risen to the point of atrociously outpacing incomes.

Incomes and earning power are an even more important part of the solution to the present challenge than the wishfulness of reducing prices.

May God be brutal with anyone who says that increased wages will exacerbate inflation: even every rookie economist knows that it is not money supply but decrease in the supply of goods and services, ESPECIALLY of agricultural produce, that causes inflation.

Thankfully, that is not the problem.

The problem is income distribution.

Agitation for wage increase has been endless since wages were invented and I’m talking thousands of years ago when the first recorded strike was incidented in Ancient Egypt.

That’s just the way of workers.

Wages must be INCREASED across board and in absolutely all sectors.

Instructively, we are all guilty in the payment of satanic wages in this country.

Government underpays its workers.

The private sector is even worse.

Some Nigerians are still paying their gatemen, house helps, cooks, drivers and other domestic staff the same crap they paid them four years, if not eight years ago!

Do you even have a conscience as a Nigerian or is it just to keep shifting blame and complaining about President Tinubu?

What of you?

What are you doing in your own little area of power, authority and influence?

If we prefer to avoid this elephant in the room of low salaries, wages and earning power, we will only most hypocritically be avoiding the main problem.

Funny enough, the diabolically low incomes of Nigerians (public, private and domestic sectors), aside, even the exchange rate, plus purchasing power parity, plus per capita income, all add up to a much LOWER cost of living in Nigeria than most countries, if not any other country, in the world.

We have just been most ungodly in our income distribution paradigm in this country and it is our patriotic obligation to now assist our President in correcting that anomaly in the face of the present challenge.

Indeed, if we don’t solve the wages, salaries, emoluments and remunerations problem we inherited from the colonial era, we will only keep running circles around the obvious solution to the problem at hand.

Low earnings of Nigerian workers is the elephant in the room that we can no longer afford to ignore or pretend is not the issue; if it defeated us in Cote D’Ivoire, we must now defeat it on home soil.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.