Date: 2020-03-13

Yesterday, I met the labour leaders to discuss the new minimum wage.

When we came on board we saw a lot of gaps in salary payment. The N18000 minimum wage was not being paid and there were a lot of casual workers. For example, we had to pay the teachers of colleges of education over N750million arrears of their salary alone and the salaries of primary school teachers of the College of Education in Ilorin were not paid for 30 months.

Now moving forward with the new N30,000 minimum wage, we do not want a repeat of that situation; we want everybody to get their salaries as and when due.

We have found out that the local governments cannot pay the N30,000 wage at the scale we are prepared to sign. The understanding is that the state and local government must pay on the same template/scale. If it is about going ahead and signing what is popular, I can sign today. But it is a choice between signing what is popular and what is practicable. I can sign a popular deal today with the union but by January next year, the local governments would be owing their staff close to N8billion. Then that is when the major strike will come in. This is something I really do not want. We therefore need to mitigate the situation and find a lasting solution to what we are doing.

For example, the local governments struggled to pay the salary for January and February. What came in from Abuja could not pay their salaries. When I contested in 2011 under the platform of CPC, part of my manifesto was that we must abolish this issue of state government running the account of local government, and I am glad that when we came in the federal government insisted that all monies to local governments must go to them. And since we came in that is what has been happening. Nobody has touched local governments' monies. We didn't give it to them and went back to take the money away from them. So they have their money to spend and they have been making savings (when they had surplus) and the savings simply came from the fact that the DPMs have a spending limit. So it is with these savings and their IGR that they were able to augment the shortfall in their salaries in January and February. The salary we are talking about in this instance is the N18,000 minimum wage. So if they are struggling to pay N18,000 minimum wage, how do they pay N30,000 minimum wage? That is a big challenge to us. The other big challenge is that we can see the way the global economy is. Our budget had been predicated on $57 per barrel but oil is now below $35 per barrel.

I don't want us to go back to an era when local councils were paying just 40% workers' salaries. We don't want to be remembered for paying such. We don't want to pay half salary. That is why we want to sign what the local councils can realistically pay.