Statistics in 2023 show that many African countries pay far higher than the $160 minimum wage than Nigeria does.
A Nigerian lawyer, Femi Emmanuel Emodamori, has called on President Bola Tinubu’s administration to provide a decent national minimum wage for Nigerian workers using the prisoners’ template.
Emodamori, who made the call on Sunday in a statement he personally signed and made available to journalists, said on October 27, 2021, the Senate Committee on Interior approved a modest increase in the daily feeding allowance of each inmate in the Nigerian Correctional Services from N450 to N1,000, which ironically translates to N30,000 per month, which is exactly the same official minimum wage being paid to the Nigerian workers.
He said, “A prisoner pays no rent, transport fares, electricity bills, or any other utility bills, therefore, paying the same N30,000 approved for feeding (just feeding) each of the inmates, to a Nigerian worker with a wife and at least two children, paying annual house rent, daily transport fares, school fees, electricity bills and other utilities, and still expected to support his aged parents, is, in my candid opinion, completely unjust, and tantamount to servitude.
“It is a gross violation of Article 23(3) of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides that:
“Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by means of social protection.”
He stressed that there is no better time to seriously interrogate what qualifies as a decent minimum wage than now that President Tinubu, Senate President Godswill Akpabio, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are all vowing to ensure that Nigerian workers earn what they have all described as “a decent living wage”.
He said, “In fairness to this government, it appears to have inherited a quite pathetic economic situation. But Mr. President rightly said we should not pity him, since he even danced all over the country to apply for the job; and so be it. Let us not cry louder than the bereaved.
“My simple submission, therefore, is that we cannot have a decent living or minimum wage with anything worse or less than the Nigerian prisoners’ ‘template’.
“If we feed every prisoner with N1,000 daily, then a man should not feed himself and a wife as well as two children with less than N4,000 daily (which translates to N120,000 monthly) for him and his family to enjoy just the prisoners’ portion. Would that be asking for too much? The N120,000 is just about $160, using an exchange rate of N750 to a dollar.”
Emodamori pointed out that statistics in 2023 show that many African countries pay far higher than the $160 minimum wage than Nigeria does.
He said that African countries including Seychelles pay $456 (N342,000) as minimum wage while Libya pays $322 (N241,000) as minimum wage; Morocco – $315 (N236,000); Gabon – $256 (N192,000); South Africa – $242 (N181,500); Mauritius – $240 (N180,000) and Equatorial Guinea – $200 (N150,000).
“The current N30,000 minimum wage in Nigeria translates to an abysmal $40. That, to me, is nothing but a slave wage.
“The official revelation we now have is that the value of the gold being plundered and smuggled out of Nigeria with private jets by some private businessmen who pay virtually nothing in tax is about $10 billion or N7.5 trillion annually.
“The data obtained from the budget implementation report of the Federal Government also states that our annual personnel cost in 2022 was N4.11 trillion.
“That means the value of gold (just gold) being illegally plundered from Nigeria annually may be enough to triple our current minimum wage to N90,000 ($120), and that would still be lower than the N150,000 ($200) being paid by Equatorial Guinea, the least of the above listed seven African countries.
“In fact, earlier today (Sunday), the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, was quoted in the national dailies to have confirmed that Nigeria is still losing about 400,000 barrels of crude oil daily to local and international thieves, despite the government’s efforts to curtail the menace. At $76 per barrel, that would be $30,400,000 daily. Using an exchange rate of N750 to a dollar, it would be N22.8 billion daily. In 365 days, that would be over N8 trillion.
“So, the value of the gold and crude oil being stolen in Nigeria annually alone could conveniently catapult our minimum wage to N180,000, apart from leakages through theft of other natural resources, and the “fantastically corrupt” system in Nigeria (to borrow the May 2016 notorious phrase of David Cameron, former UK Prime Minister).
“No Nigerian worker and members of his family deserves, in aggregate, anything less than the daily feeding allowance of each prisoner. Otherwise, we may be consciously or unconsciously saying that the whole nation is no better for our workers than a big ‘prison’, with our political leaders acting as Warders and/or Chief Superintendents.
“In that case, perhaps our national identity registration is nothing but prisoners’ smug shots, and curtailing the ‘Japa’ syndrome and its adverse economic effects, including brain drains, may be nothing other than a fruitless effort to prevent some massive jailbreaks.
“We have too much anger, anguish, dissatisfaction, disenchantment and disillusionment in our nation today. People are hungry and angry.
“There is an urgent need for us to assuage their despondency by paying them a decent and realistic living wage, which cannot in any way, be less than our own prisoners’ feeding template,” he said.
