Comrade Ayuba Wabba, the NLC president, said Nigerian workers were running out of patience with the government over the delay and we’re getting more and more agitated.

Two weeks ago, the national minimum wage tripartite committee put in place by the president to review the current minimum wage had presented its report recommending N30,000 as the national minimum wage, but the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) said they can’t pay the figure presented by the committee.

Comrade Wabba speaking at the 2018 Harmattan School of the Congress in Abuja, said workers are running out of patience on the implementation of the new wage. He described as unfortunate the position being taken by some governors who are saying they can’t pay the N30,000, but are spending billions of dollars in the name of security votes which they can’t account for. He also dismissed claims that the implementation of the new national minimum wage would lead to inflation in the country, adding that when salaries of political office holders was increased by 800 percent in 2008, it did not cause inflation, and wander why just N30,000 for workers can cause inflation.

However, the Global Wage Report 2018/19 released by the ILO reveals that the world’s wage growth also hit a 10-year low, the last of its kind being in 2007.
In analysing wage growth, the report finds that in advanced G20 countries, real wage growth declined from 0.9 per cent in 2016 to 0.4 per cent in 2017. By contrast, in emerging and developing G20 countries, real wage growth fluctuated between 4.9 per cent in 2016 and 4.3 per cent in 2017.