The governor of Ekiti State, Mr. Biodun Oyebanji, stated on Wednesday that governors do not oppose the adoption of a living wage for Nigerian workers under the shield of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum.
According to Oyebanji, the NGF was just demanding fiscal federalism, which would require each state to have the capacity to pay for its own expenses.
The Federal Government and organised labour are at odds over how to introduce the new minimum wage for workers without first giving notice.
Although President Bola Tinubu was recommended N62,000 by the government-appointed tripartite committee, the governors argued that most states could not afford the amount and requested that the new minimum salary be set at N57,000.
Nevertheless, organised labour refused to accept the NGF’s and the tripartite committee’s recommendations, settling on the N250,000 benchmark at the committee’s last meeting.
The labour force criticised the governors harshly, charging them with being indifferent to the suffering of the workers when Tinubu chose to hold talks with the NGF and the employers.
Speaking in Ado Ekiti at the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria’s Seventh Quadrennial Delegates’ Conference, Oyebanji asserted that no state desires to reduce the size of its workforce, but rather, each state is interested in figuring out what it could afford to keep workers from eventually being laid off.
