Allow Salaries To Reflect The Cost Of Living — NLC Tells FG

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has urged that workers in the nation receive a living wage and has requested that the Federal Government permit salaries and earnings that are in line with living expenses.

This was stated by NLC President Joe Ajaero in Abuja during the 11th Quadrennial Delegates Conference of the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN).

The NLC had proposed N709,000 as the new national minimum wage at the public hearing of the North Central minimum wage bargaining committee.

The proposal put forth by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to establish a new national minimum wage was N447,000.

The existing N30,000 minimum wage, which was enacted by the late President Muhammadu Buhari, is set to expire in April.

Ajaero lamented the fact that the nation's economic woes had turned laborers into vagrants.

He said, “Food has become so scarce that Nigerians have become scavengers and resorting to raiding food trucks and warehouses for food. If those in government cannot see the danger in what is happening, we see it and must ensure that government fulfills its duties to the people.

“We are increasingly going hungry in our father's land and cannot continue in this destitution. The greatest unifier and mobiliser of a people is hunger, so, it insults commonsense when those in government assumes that somebody is sponsoring people who are protesting because of hunger.

“If anybody is arousing the people, it is those in government whose policies have Impoverished the people and stripped them of those values that make them human beings.

“The looting of food trucks and warehouses is what you get when this happens. Unless something is done, this may unfortunately escalate. We pray it does not.

“Those who, therefore, think that they can stop us from this divine mission with their threats and violence should think twice. We cannot be cowed. We cannot surrender our natural mandate to powers and agents of poverty and emasculation. We are not after anybody's job but we must insist that the instruments of governance must be used for the greater good of the people and not to wreck their lives.

“We must insist that any political calculation that does not put the lives of Nigerians first fails abysmally and is totally unacceptable. The people of Nigeria must have to survive first so that Nigeria can survive before we begin to talk about 2027.

“We must all work together to build power with which we can use for successful engagement with those who are in charge of the various corridors of power in our dear nation. Nigerians look up to us and we must not fail them.

“We in the NLC, which includes your acting president and Deputy President of Congress, Comrade Ado Sani Minjibir, will always court and cherish your support to build the necessary structures that will make the NLC stronger, thus challenge the vicissitudes of the nation's current socioeconomic realities.”

Nkeiruka Onyejeocha, the minister of labor and employment, declared during the conference that the government was dedicated to giving Nigerians access to reasonably priced healthcare.

Onyejeocha, accompanied by Yusuf Mohammed, Director of Trade Union Services and Industrial Relations, reaffirmed the government's commitment to improving health workers' welfare benefits.

According to Kabiru Minjibir, acting national president of the Medical and Health Workers Union, the elimination of the fuel subsidy has “unleashed hardship on Nigerians.”

According to Minjibir, “anarchy may be looming if nothing practical is urgently done.”