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 Tinubuâs administration to provide a decent national minimum wage for Nigerian workers using the prisonersâ 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, âA 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.
âIt is a gross violation of Article 23(3) of the United Nationsâ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides that:
âEveryone 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.â
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 âa decent living wageâ.
He said, âIn 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.
âMy simple submission, therefore, is that we cannot have a decent living or minimum wage with anything worse or less than the Nigerian prisonersâ âtemplateâ.
âIf 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 prisonersâ portion. Would that be asking for too much? The N120,000 is just about $160, using an exchange rate of N750 to a dollar.â
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).
âThe current N30,000 minimum wage in Nigeria translates to an abysmal $40. That, to me, is nothing but a slave wage.
âThe 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.
âThe data obtained from the budget implementation report of the Federal Government also states that our annual personnel cost in 2022 was N4.11 trillion.
âThat 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.
âIn 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 governmentâs 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.
âSo, 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 âfantastically corruptâ system in Nigeria (to borrow the May 2016 notorious phrase of David Cameron, former UK Prime Minister).
âNo 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 âprisonâ, with our political leaders acting as Warders and/or Chief Superintendents.
âIn that case, perhaps our national identity registration is nothing but prisonersâ smug shots, and curtailing the âJapaâ syndrome and its adverse economic effects, including brain drains, may be nothing other than a fruitless effort to prevent some massive jailbreaks.
âWe have too much anger, anguish, dissatisfaction, disenchantment and disillusionment in our nation today. People are hungry and angry.
âThere 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 prisonersâ feeding template,â he said.