* Advocates decentralized minimum wage negotiation
By Nudoiba Ojen
Former Governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has said state governments should determine what they can pay as minimum wage.
Fayemi, who stated this in an interview of Channels Television’s Politics Today on Friday, said that minimum wage negotiations should be decentralized.
Recall that the Federal Government and labour unions have been at the negotiation table over a new minimum wage for months. While the organized labour insists on N250,000, the FG is offering N62,000.
The former governor called for a decentralised minimum wage negotiation, saying that states should determine what they can pay factoring in their peculiarities.
He said, “Every governor has to deal with the issue of national minimum wage. When I was governor and chairman of the Nigerian Governor’s Forum, my belief, even till this recent negotiation, is that we should decentralise minimum wage negotiations and allow states to have their own negotiations with their own labour unions while the Federal Government conducts its own negotiations because the fingers are not equal.
“This should be decentralised and each state should define in conjunction with its labour unions, with transparency with all the records provided to the labor unions and say, ‘Look, this is what we have, but you are also only five or 10% of our population. We also have another 90% of the population that we must attend to.”
He said, “What we’re dealing with now is dogma. Labour does not want to hear anything about decentralized national minimum wage and decentralised national minimum wage does not mean that what is paid at the level of the state will be lower than the federal.
“In the ’60s and the ’50s, civil servants in the western regions used to earn more than federal civil servants,” he said.
It will be recalled that the minimum wage talks have endured for long with reactions from stakeholders in the country.
The governors under the aegis of the NGF had insisted earlier that N60,000 offer to labour was unsustainable.
President Bola Tinubu had said at a dinner to celebrate Democracy Day on June 12 that the Federal Government would pay what it can afford.
Tinubu had said, “The minimum wage is going to be what Nigerians can afford, what you can afford, and what I can afford.”
But the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has maintained its grounds on N250,000 as a new minimum wage.
