Hunger In The Land, Minimum Wage, And Our Poverty Of Ideology 

By Henry Duru

No matter one’s political or ideological leaning, one thing they cannot reasonably dispute is the unprecedented hunger in the land. The cost of consumer goods has skyrocketed so much so that the spending power of an average Nigerian has become considerably weakened. Many people are living on the edge, they’re barely surviving. Many years ago, when things were much better, we had families that found it difficult to feed, talk more of today when things have got much worse.

It is in the midst of all this that the issue of national minimum wage has continued to occupy national attention. Unfortunately, what is coming out of the FG-labour engagement is nothing different from what we have been familiar with in the past – government offering what cannot, by any stretch of imagination, qualify as a living wage and cajoling labour to accept it in the “interest” of the nation. On the contrary, it is in the “interest” of the nation for legislators and members of the executive arm of government to continue to be enriched with humongous wages and allowances. Otherwise I need to be schooled in the exact meaning of national interest if that interest can be alienated from the welfare and happiness of the common people.

The NLC and the TUC had initially demanded N615, 000 as minimum wage, later bringing it down to N497, 000, and ultimately pegging the figure at N250, 000. While labour may have put forward these amounts merely to place itself in a strong bargaining position against the government, there is nothing unusual or even spectacular about a Nigerian worker earning minimum of N250, 000 in the current economic circumstances where N10, 000 can hardly provide for a family’s daily meal (N300, 000 will be needed for a month’s feeding at N10, 000 per day). In truth, the Nigerian worker should have more if they’re to live fairly comfortably. But sadly the government is offering N62, 000 as what it considers a minimum wage!

Over the years, the condition of the Nigerian worker has continued to deteriorate given our successive government’s leaning towards state capitalism as against state welfarism. No thanks to our fawning acquiescence to the cold neo-liberalist economic policies sold to us by the World Bank and the IMF.

These policies have not only weakened the purchasing power of our citizens, but have also prevented us from continuing with our old welfarist practices like building living’ quarters for workers, providing car loans to them, and more recently, subsidising fuel and electricity. I am yet to fathom any logical reason why we decided to drop the colonial legacy of maintaining living quarters for government workers. Instead of stopping this, the government should have gone ahead to add transportation subsidy through purchase of buses for intra-city movement at reduced rates. In many European countries, government subsidised transport systems are common.

Policies like low cost living quarters for workers and transportation subsidy would have helped improve their living conditions thus saving the nation the constant debate and fight over minimum wage. Low cost quarters for workers will drastically cut their spending on accommodation as well as reduce the demand for accommodation in cities and towns thus keeping rents as low as possible for everybody. Similarly, transport subsidy will mean reduced daily spending for workers and other citizens. Unfortunately, state welfarism has since been relegated to the background in favour of state capitalism.

This is the reason why successive governments continue to rehash the argument of paucity of funds and adverse economic consequences whenever the issue of minimum wage comes up. Otherwise, there were times things were better than they’re now, yet the governments of those days sang the same song as that of today. Some of the administrations never raised the minimum wage at all even when the law demands periodic reviews. Thus, it is clearly more of a question of ideology and priority than that of scarcity.

We’re obviously obsessed with the capitalist ideal where growth must be achieved only through profit-motivated private sector investments. The state, hence, invests little or nothing directly in people’s welfare. All the state is bothered about are projects like the Lagos -Calabar coastal highway aimed primarily at enhancing long term capitalist business activities while the present welfare of the people is neglected.

This is also the reason anytime unbudgeted money comes into the coffers of the government by way of recovered loots, for instance, all we hear is how it will be used for this road or that bridge. Nothing is said about welfarist investments like workers’ quarters and government subsidised public transportation. Instructively, the only welfarist policies we have had in recent years, such as SURE-P, wage award and so on, have come by way of concessionary measures which the government was forced to take following labour’s opposition to its anti-welfarist policies like removal of fuel subsidy.

Imagine where we would have been today if the millions of dollars of Abacha loot, and other homunguos recoveries by the EFCC in the past two decades as well as hundreds of millions of naira reportedly saved through mechanisms like IPPIS and TSA had been invested in welfarist programmes. One interesting thing about such programmes is that the effect is immediate, decisively and directly felt. No one is left in doubt as to their positive impact. Thus, like in fuel subsidy removal, the negative effect of their withdrawal is equally immediate, direct and decisive.

However, we must also point out here that the amount of looting and wastages going on in the public sector is so stupendous that the government’s cry of no-funds whenever the people demand a fair deal is of little moral weight. If corruption and administrative recklessness are tamed considerably, so much resources will be saved to give civil servants a more reasonable pay and the rest of us a much better life. The politicians that are always telling workers to be patient and wait for the never-coming better days should think seriously about this.

Nonetheless, to whatever extent paucity of funds may be responsible for the current state of pay of workers, many government workers are themselves as guilty as politicians. The rate of corruption among civil servants cries loudly to heaven for vengeance. Many of them can today boast of assets higher in value than those of some businesspersons. The funds we are searching for to pay workers are scattered in many private pockets – both of politicians and some workers themselves.

However, the fight against corruption in civil service cannot be realistic with government workers earning what is far below a living wage. As said in local parlance, “man must survive” – it is, therefore, illogical and indeed immoral to confine one to an unsustainable income and yet expect them not to do other things – legitimate and illegitimate – to avoid starvation.

In conclusion, we are a people suffering from ideological disorientation. This is a nation that set out to achieve greatness through state welfarism as evident in the policies of our first republic leaders who gave free education, ran vibrant scholarship programmes, built living quarters for workers, gave car loans, implemented agricultural subsidies and price control, and established public corporations like P&T (later NIPOST and NITEL) and ECN (later NEPA) to offer services to the public on non-profit basis. But with time, we started shifting from welfarism to state capitalism simply because we are incapable of checking corruption and administrative incompetence that were hobbling these people-oriented programmes. Now that the IMF and World Bank-authored scripts of state capitalism have wrought more harm on our people, where do we go from here?

This is where we expect the Labour Party to stand out in terms of ideological stance. This is a party whose main selling point in the last general elections was its alliance with the labour unions. Having got a reasonable number of legislators in the National Assembly, they should be showing us some difference in terms of their brand of opposition anchored on the labour philosophy of welfarism. On the contrary, we have seen no difference between these persons and their colleagues from other parties. They have become part of the usual sharing of expensive cars and approving bloated budgets for legislators to the detriment of the workers and other common people. Have they forsaken the workers and common people? We need to hear them speak out in favour of the workers. Above all, when President Tinubu finally presents a bill for the amendment of the National Minimum Wage Act, we need to see them strongly debate and vote against any amount that is less than a genuine living wage for the workers they represent.

I laugh at my daydreaming.

We are in dire need of ideologically driven politics where we would have real ideological alternatives. For now, we are far away from that.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.,