PRESIDENT Bola Tinubu has signed the National Minimum Wage Act 2019 Amendment Bill into law, which will ensure that workers in Nigeria earn N70,000 as the minimum wage.
The president assented to the bill, on Monday, July 29, at the State House in Abuja barely a week after the National Assembly passed the bill.
Recall that the Nigerian Senate on Tuesday, July 23, passed the minimum wage amendment bill, after the bill speedily scaled through first, second and third readings.
The Senate unanimously voted for the consideration and approval of the bill minutes after it was transmitted to it by President Bola Tinubu.
The bill sought to increase the national minimum wage and reduced the period for periodic review from five years to three years.
The upward review by the federal government came after a series of negotiations between the government’s representatives and organised labour.
Governors across the country’s 36 states had opposed the N60,000 minimum wage initially proposed by the federal government.
The governors rejected the proposal in a statement by the director, media and public affairs of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), Halimah Salihu Ahmed, on Friday, June 7.
The workers had embarked on a strike on Monday, June 3, and relaxed it the following day, to compel the government to agree on an acceptable minimum wage.
The suspension of the industrial action was at the heel of the resolution reached between the federal government representatives and the labour after a six-hour meeting in the evening of Monday, June 3, in Abuja.
Nigerian workers had based their demand for a new minimum wage on the snowballing cost of living in the country, largely occasioned by the Tinubu administration’s policies.
Usman Mustapha is a solution journalist with International Centre for Investigative Reporting. You can easily reach him via: [email protected]. He tweets @UsmanMustapha_M