Still on states and minimum wage

IF the statement credited to the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) last week is to be believed, only 15 out of Nigeria’s 36 state governments are paying the national minimum wage enacted by the National Assembly and signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019. According to media reports, teachers in primary and secondary schools in 21 states of the federation are still earning below N30,000 following the refusal of state governments to implement the national minimum wage. The states said to have fully implemented the wage for basic school teachers are Oyo, Lagos, Akwa Ibom, Ebonyi, Edo, Ekiti, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kwara, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Plateau, Rivers and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Indeed, according to the NUT, some states reverted to the N18,000 minimum wage and spurned efforts to get them to pay teachers the current wage.

A state government is reported to have implemented only 40 percent payment for  teachers in charge of Primary 1-6 and JSS 1-3, while in another, secondary school teachers are said to be earning N10,000 per month. However, on Wednesday this week, the Borno State governor, Prof. Babagana Zulum, approved the immediate implementation of the N30,000 minimum wage to 4,491 qualified teachers  under the payroll of the Local Government Education Authority in the state with effect from August, 1, 2022. Governor Zulum gave the approval during a meeting with the chairmen and members of the state’s civil service and local government service commissions, Head of Service, as well members of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT),  and Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) at the Government House, Maiduguri on Wednesday.

Just how can workers being paid peanuts survive? How are they expected to feed, pay their children’s school fees and meet up with other family obligations? Or is it that they are being thought of by the governors as the dregs of the society? It is a tragedy that thousands of Nigerian workers are not enjoying the current minimum wage, which is hardly enough to buy a bag of rice. The fact that workers, teachers in particular, are being paid a pittance despite their huge workload is disturbing. How are they expected to build up the next generation of leaders when they are, for all practical purposes, not even in a position to derive any joy from their jobs?

This state of affairs is scandalous and shows the level of insensitivity in governance in the country. It is, of course, true that the governors in the affected states have not refrained from paying themselves any of the allowances due to them, including outrageous security allowances, yet they do not mind paying teachers a minimum wage that is not even enough to cater for them in the final analysis. How are teachers expected to survive and sustain themselves on the new minimum wage and be able to give their best to the society when the rising cost of living and inflation have made nonsense of the wages anyway?

It is horrendous that some states have even reverted to the old minimum wage of N18,000  that became law in 2011.  It is really very shameful that governments are behaving so irresponsibly in the country just because citizens are perceived to be too powerless to call them to order. The lesson in all of this is that teachers themselves, as a vital segment of the population, have to go beyond simply accepting the reality of irresponsible governance and work with others to ensure that they make government and governance accountable through elections. They have a duty to impose electoral accountability on all the governments that have made life difficult for them by not implementing the new national minimum wage.