The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has rebuffed President Bola Tinubu’s claims that an agreement has been reached on a new national minimum wage, insisting that its demand for a new national minimum wage remains N250, 000.
Speaking on Wednesday during his nationwide broadcast to mark Democracy Day, Tinubu said a consensus had been reached on the long-debated new minimum wage between the federal government and the organised labour.
The president revealed that an executive bill would soon be sent to the National Assembly to formalise the new minimum wage agreement.
He said, “In this spirit, we have negotiated in good faith and with open arms with organised labour on a new national minimum wage.
“We shall soon send an executive bill to the National Assembly to enshrine what has been agreed upon as part of our law for the next five years or less.”
But in a statement yesterday, the acting President of NLC, Prince Adewale Adeyanju, said there was no agreement reached by the Tripartite Committee on the National Minimum Wage at the time negotiations ended on Friday, June 7, 2024.
He said, “Our demand still remains N250, 000 only, and we have not been given any compelling reasons to change this position which we consider a great concession by Nigerian workers during the tripartite negotiation process.”
NLC said it had to raise the point for President Tinubu, Nigerians and stakeholders to be aware because it appeared that those who briefed him on the outcome of the tripartite negotiation did not tell him the true situation.
The statement reads in part: “We reiterate that it will be extremely difficult for Nigerian workers to accept any national minimum wage figure that approximates to a starvation wage. We cannot be working and yet remain in abject poverty.
“While the president may have accurately recounted parts of our democratic journey’s history, it is evident that he has been misinformed regarding the outcome of the wage negotiation process.
“The NLC would have expected that the advisers of the president would have told him that we neither reached any agreement with the federal government and the employers on the base figure for a national minimum wage nor on its other components.
“We are, therefore, surprised at the submission of Mr. President over a supposed agreement. We believe that he may have been misled into believing that there was an agreement with the NLC and TUC. There was none, and we must let the president, Nigerians and other national stakeholders understand this immediately to avoid a mix-up in the ongoing conversation around the national minimum wage. We have also not seen a copy of the document submitted to him and will not accept any doctored document.”
