Organised Labour has dismissed President Bola Tinubu’s assertion that a consensus has been reached on a new national minimum wage. During his nationwide broadcast to mark Democracy Day, Tinubu claimed that the Federal Government and labour unions had agreed on the long-debated minimum wage and announced plans to submit an executive bill to the National Assembly to formalize this agreement. He highlighted that his administration preferred a democratic approach over dictatorship in addressing labour demands.
However, in a statement on Wednesday, Prince Adewale Adeyanju, the acting President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), refuted this claim. Adeyanju clarified that no agreement was reached by the Tripartite Committee on the National Minimum Wage by the end of negotiations on June 7, 2024. He stated that two figures—N250,000 from Organised Labour and N62,000 from the government and Organised Private Sector—were proposed but had yet to be submitted to the President.
Adeyanju asserted that any claims to the contrary were fabricated and unacceptable to Labour. He emphasized, “The NLC would have expected that the President’s advisers would have informed him that we neither reached any agreement with the federal government and employers on the base figure for a National Minimum Wage nor on its other components. Our demand remains N250,000, and we have not been given any compelling reasons to change this position, which we consider a significant concession by Nigerian workers during the tripartite negotiation process.”
He expressed surprise at President Tinubu’s statement, suggesting that the President may have been misled into believing an agreement existed. Adeyanju stressed the importance of clarifying this misunderstanding to prevent confusion in ongoing discussions about the national minimum wage.
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