The slave stamp called wages

THE story published by online medium, SaharaReporters, titled “Indian company where Nigerians are paid 20k a month while foreigners earn 2M” captures the misery evident in the everyday life of the average Nigerian. According to the report, “workers at the African Natural Resources and Mines Limited (ANRML), an Indian-owned iron ore mining and processing plant located in Gujeni village, Kagarko Local Government Area of Kaduna State, accused the company of inhumane treatment, discrimination, and using the Nigerian Army to intimidate staff members who staged a peaceful protest demanding better working conditions.” Hear the workers,  who were tired of being treated like “slaves in their own country”: “We walk 30 kilometres daily to get here. We work six days a week. Meanwhile, foreign workers—many with just diploma certificates—earn between N1.5 million and N2 million monthly, paid in dollars, with accommodation and official cars. Nigerians earn only N25,000 to N50,000 with no housing allowance or health insurance. This is the third protest since the company began operations.”

I am not interested in the rest of this story: it is clear that in this country, governance, in particular the protection of the working populace, has been in abeyance for millennia. In pondering the slavery stamp called wages in this country, I am reminded of a line by one of our famous musicians which roughly translates to the following in English: “How terribly the poor person suffers! Thinking of my own case led me to this thought.” On Nigerian soil, foreigners treat the Nigerian masses like garbage, precisely because that is how the government treats them. Indeed, it seems that what a foreigner cannot use Nigerians to mould on Nigerian soil does not exist, and this is a logical corollary of the Ponzi scheme set over the people called government. For instance, through fuel and electricity costs, the government ruthlessly exploits Nigerians and fills the public space with its henchmen screaming to the high heavens that the people ought to be grateful to it for their own emasculation, adumbrating what the theorist, Louis Althusser, calls the ideological state apparatuses.

As everyone knows too well, slavery came with many horrors. From Africa to the Arab world and Europe, slaves were treated worse than animals. They could be tortured or executed at will. Here is a famous story by the US historian, Rebecca Onion: “In Virginia, Eudora Ramsay Richardson, the state director, refused to believe a story that Roscoe Lewis, the director of that state’s Negro Writers Unit (and a professor at the Hampton Institute), recorded during an interview with ex-slave Henrietta King. King told Lewis that she had taken some candy at age eight or nine, and that her slaveholder had punished her by holding her head under a rocking chair while she whipped her. The incident had resulted in a crushed jawbone and permanent disfigurement… Disbelieving Lewis’s account, Richardson went to King’s home to fact-check it, thinking it was a ‘gross exaggeration’. She found instead that ‘[King] looks exactly as Mr. Lewis describes her and she told me, almost word for word the story that Mr. Lewis relates.”

If you want to relive the horrors of slavery, look up the story of the former American slave by the name of ‘Gordon’ or ‘Whipped Peter’.  Gordon escaped from a Louisiana plantation in 1863, and the image of his scarred back became a symbol for the American Abolitionist Movement. It was common, during slavery, for slaves to be branded and “ironed.” You see, slave owners were masters of wickedness, the kind of people the Yoruba say would never handle their own things the way they do those of others (Ika o je se tie be). But talking about the  physical  and mental abuse, forced labour and separation of families that slavery engendered inevitably leads to an examination of current conditions, and the realization that slavery has never ended, only subjected to stylistic modifications designed to lull the average worker into a false sense of independence. Do you know that there are Nigerians earning N20,000 per month in May 2025? What is called salary is nothing but a slave stamp. It is a pittance to keep you alive and grumbling till the next month.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Kenyan literary giant, spent decades foregrounding this question of dark exploitation of labour. In Nigeria, many companies are mere animal farms where the leadership and their honchos police every dissent, much in the line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And this is precisely because they have borrowed a leaf from officialdom. Consider, for instance, that the current minimum wage, N70,000, can only buy you a bag of rice on those months when the market chooses to be magnanimous. Last year, a 50kg bag of rice cost as high as N100,000, but the problem did not start today. In a report titled “Skyrocketing Cost of Staple Raises Charges of Corruption, Leads to Unrest”, The Washington Post’s Leon Dash wrote on December 26, 1980: “The latest scandal in this West African capital, whose combative traders thrive on freewheeling capitalism, is an astronomical leap in the price of rice. Any West African government is playing with fire if it fails to ensure that rice, a major staple of urban populations, is available at reasonable prices. Skyrocketing rice prices have sparked some bitter urban riots in the region and indirectly set into motion events that brought down the government of William Tolbert in Liberia earlier this year.”

Well, rice. Shortly before General Muhammadu Buhari came to fight corruption in 2015, a bag of quality-grade rice sold for N7,500. I remember that previously, the cost hovered between N6000 and N7,500 depending on the grade of rice. Well, the cost gradually rose to about N26,000 in 2020 and by November 2021, it had risen to N32,000 on the average. By December 2023, a 50-kg bag of rice sold for around N47,000, but by the end of 2024, it sold for between N95 and N105,000. This year, it has hovered between N87,000 and N68,000. Before Alhaji Shehu Shagari and his One Nation fraudsters took over the reins in 1979, a bag of rice sold for an average of N5, but the story changed under him with the commodity costing as high as N32 at some point. Still, with the minimum wage of N125, you could comfortably buy three bags of rice, as you could under the Abdulsalami Abubakar administration which paid state workers N2500 and federal workers N3500. Under Olusegun Obasanjo, state workers generally got 5,500 while federal workers got  N7,500, and Umaru Yar-Adua/Goodluck Jonathan’s 18,000 followed the same trajectory, until Buhari’s N30,000 minimum wage which compounded the misery of Nigerians because it often could not buy a bag of rice. Then came Bola Tinubu’s tribulation wage of N70,000. The country and its governance evidently need restructuring.

Most Nigerians work in slave plantations with a new form of “apes obey!” If you want calm in your cottonhead period, do not spend your entire lifetime working for anyone.

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