I swear it, solemnly I swear it: the title of this piece was to have been “The national minimum wage should be 60K, not 30K!” But I couldn’t keep that title. Why not? Well, seeing that title, as the possibility of nationwide industrial action looms on the horizon, many readers would have thought that I was being deliberately over-dramatic in using such a title. Why else would I have declared that the new national minimum wage should at least double the amount that workers and their organizations are asking for if my intention was not to raise the temperature of national discourse to a boiling point?
But there is not the slightest intension on my part to be overdramatic or melodramatic: I do sincerely believe that the Nigerian national minimum wage at this point in time should be no less than 60K. All the same, I of course realized that if I had stuck to that title for this piece, nearly all the conservative and even liberal economists and econometrists in the country would have declared me a naïve and unreliable commentator on the subject since all the “scientific” and “objective” data available indicate that neither government nor employers in the private sector have the capacity to pay a national minimum wage as high as 60K. “Ah”, these conservative and reactionary economists would have said, “look at this professor of literary studies, this professor of fictions, dabbling into the field of economic science!”
As a columnist, an intellectual and ideological activist, never start a discussion, an argument with the discursive field massively stacked against you! This is one of my guiding principles as an activist columnist. And that is why I changed the title that I had in mind for this essay to the one that appears at the head of this piece: The national minimum wage and the retrograde anti-worker and anti-human forces against it. To speak quite plainly, if I had kept the title that I had in mind, it would have been quite easy for government and their ideological mouthpieces to dismiss or diminish what I have to say in this essay. But with a change in the title that forces the government and employers of labour in the private sector to have to defend their arguments and perspectives on the national minimum wage, we are in a different discursive terrain, a terrain in which the social and human costs of the issues come to the foreground of the discussion.
Does it mean that even with the change in the title of the essay, it is still possible for me to argue that the national minimum wage should be much higher than 30K? After all, 30K is itself twelve thousand naira higher than the current national minimum wage of 18K, isn’t it? And I say that I can argue for 60K? Yes, I can and will indeed make that argument in this piece. But before getting to this central issue of this essay, it is useful to review arguments of government and employers of labour in the private sector of the economy – together with their academic and ideological supporters – against 30K, not to talk of the 60K that I am proposing in this article. This is like playing the devil’s advocate; but it is a step we must necessarily take in this discussion.
The most “reasonable” or persuasive argument against 30K minimum wage is this: even at the current figure of 18K, most of the governments of the federation at the state and local levels are unable to regularly pay all their workers, be they at the minimum wage level or at the upper levels of the public payroll. If this is the case – and it is the case – what is the point of raising the minimum wage? You are unable to pay the current 18K and regardless of this fact, you raise the figure to 30K? To the counter-argument that government will have the capacity to pay the minimum wage – and all the wages and salaries at the other higher scales of the public payroll – if the colossal looting, waste, mismanagement and squandermania that afflict our rulers are brought to an end, the government has responded that you cannot put the horse before the cart, meaning that the corruption and the waste should be stopped first before the capacity to pay higher minimum and general wage levels can be realistically and reasonably expected to emerge.
The government also uses the argument of inflationary and destabilizing economic impact of implementing a 30K minimum wage at the present time. Here’s the argument: the minimum wage being the lowest level of wages below which it is illegal for all employers of labour to go, its rise implies – and is often followed by – a general rise in wages and remuneration at all levels and in all spheres of the national economy. For this reason, all governments are normatively resistant to a rise in the minimum wage.
In the case of the Nigerian economy at the present period of sharp rises in poverty and unemployment levels with a corresponding over-supply of labour, a significant increase in the minimum wage would cause further weakening of the economy. The thing to do in such circumstances, it is argued by the government, is to first reduce the dangerously high levels of poverty and unemployment before “artificially” increasing the minimum wage, a policy decision that would, at any rate, affect or benefit only a small segment of the working poor. In other words, yes, some workers would benefit from a 30K minimum wage, but what of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of job losses that would follow in its wake? What of the increased borrowing that would result from having to pay the new minimum wage? Wouldn’t this cause a fiscal crisis of immense proportions for an economy that is already massively debt-ridden?
You have to admit that whatever you think about raising or not raising the national minimum wage at this time, these are powerful arguments. But, a correction: they are not powerful arguments; rather, they only seem like powerful arguments; in actuality, they are sophistical. If that is the case, the response of workers and their allies should be both to argue against these arguments and to go beyond them into discourses that the government and its apologists never go. Dear reader, let us take each of these two steps one by one.
First then, a word or two about the sophistry, the extreme and irresponsible bad faith of the government’s arguments. There is no reason in the world why raising the minimum wage to 30K, or 60K – or even 100K, as Omoyele Sowore, the presidential candidate of the AAC has argued – should force the government to go and borrow more money or cause uncontrollable inflation and job losses. Why not? The money is there, it is as simple as that. Yes, the money is there aplenty, compatriots, it is there. Here is a staggering and absolutely irrefutable fact about this money that is there and how it is currently being spent. In July 2013, The Economist, that bible of economic liberalism in our world, published a comprehensive report in which it was revealed that wages, salaries and remunerations in Nigeria were the most unfair and exploitative in any national economy in the world. For instance, the report highlighted the following fact: Nigerian legislators receive 166 times the GDP per capita; by contrast, the majority of the nations in the world are in single or double digits, not triple digits as in our country. For another instance, in the UK, British MPs are paid two and a half times the GDP per capita; yes, just two and a half times. Nigeria? 166 times of the per capita GDP. Listen to the ultimate finding, the final declaration of The Economist on this point: no other country, now or in the past, has ever had the scale of unfairness and disequilibrium between the highest and the lowest paid wages and remunerations as in PDP’s Nigeria and now the APC’s Nigeria.
By making having to go borrowing in order to pay a 30K minimum wage so central to its arguments, the government is signaling that it has no intension of touching a kobo of the humungous salaries, remunerations and allowances paid to our legislators and other public officeholders. But the time has come to completely reject this stand of the government. The condemnation of the unfairness and the inhumanity of our public payroll is as widespread within Nigeria itself as it is throughout the world. The time has come: we must now insist that only a comprehensive, total review of the remuneration structure of our economy can determine what a fair, just and rational minimum wage should be. The government is saying 25K; labour itself is saying 30K; I am saying 60K; Sowore is saying 100K. I think he is probably closer to what it should be. But this is beside the point that I am making here: the time has come for a comprehensive shakeup of the structure of wages and salaries in this country!
To make the case for this radical and egalitarian review, we have to go beyond the conventional framework and the parameters of the discourse that we have, so far in this discussion, been observing and following. This framework assumes that the challenge of arriving at an appropriate and fair figure for the national minimum wage is not only technocratic but is universally so. Thus, in this model, in this framework, you take things as they are and try to adjust them in light of selected variables like inflation, debt burdens, the existing public payroll, and the over-supply of labour.
But this is false, limited and limiting. There are no universal norms for determining wage and remuneration levels across the entirety of the national economies of the world. There are capitalist and non-capitalist variations all around. And even within the capitalist framework itself, there are incredibly wide and divergent differences. For instance, in all of the advanced, liberal capitalist economies, the minimum wage is calculated per hour, not per month as in our country. And moreover, in those economies, the minimum wage is carefully and insistently distinguished from what is called the living wage, which implies wages that ensure that the average family earns enough to live on, an objective which the minimum wage axiomatically cannot meet.
Which is more injurious and destabilizing to our national economy, the wages and remunerations of our legislators and public officeholders or a 30K minimum wage paid to the lowest levels of the workforce? That is the question that arises once we move out of the reigning framework for determining the national minimum wage in our country. The answer is unambiguously clear: the humungous, lopsided wages and remunerations of our legislators and public officeholders are infinitely more damaging, more crippling and stultifying to our national economy. It is nothing but a backward and retrogressive capitalism that would reward a tiny and parasitic segment of the population with the lion’s share of the national wealth and resources while keeping the majority of the workers poor and barely above starvation levels of wages and remuneration. Just think about it, compatriots: if only half of what is paid our legislator and public officeholders is spread across the lower tiers of the public payroll, this would be a tremendous boost to our economy and we might well be on our way to becoming a middle-income national economy, not the low-income economy that we still are with all of our oil-wealth and much-vaunted growth rates. Note that this is actually a capitalist-oriented change, not a non-capitalist or social-democratic socio-economic transformation. But alas, even such a minimally progressive change is quite beyond our present rulers, so utterly lacking are they in enlightened self-interest.
So, 30K, 60K or 100K? It depends on which framework you are applying, compatriots. Don’t let them fool you into thinking that things are the same all over the world in determining the national minimum wage.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
