Why Naija Governors cannot pay minimum wage

When governors meet in Abuja, bad things happen. For starters, road users need their noise-cancelling earplugs to reduce the effect of 36 sirens slashing through early morning gridlock like hot rod on butter. Citizens wear their toga of docility knowing how dangerous it is to contest the right of way with their convoys, which in […]

When governors meet in Abuja, bad things happen. For starters, road users need their noise-cancelling earplugs to reduce the effect of 36 sirens slashing through early morning gridlock like hot rod on butter. Citizens wear their toga of docility knowing how dangerous it is to contest the right of way with their convoys, which in these austere days has reduced to a minimum of twenty-one. Some swear that state resources suffer as travel allowances are paid upfront. As these meetings progress, citizens must stick their ears to their favourite news channel for resultant bad news.
Last week, the longsuffering governors met in Abuja and realized that they could no longer pay the N18, 000 minimum wage. Anyone who has watched the austere dressing of these people who ordinarily blaze the fashion trail should have seen it coming. Their contrition advertised the parlous state of their economy as they were draped in sackcloth and dabbed in ashes – gone were the factory-smelling starched brocades; the woven caps and hats, the golden cellphones and their no-nonsense security details.
I wept as I saw our governors sitting on the open floor of Evil Square while addressing a battery of reporters. I expected the entire nation to join in black after that scene, but people were going about their businesses as if nothing happened. Suddenly the Naija Labour Congress, NLC has followed Biafraud supporters in declaring the Abuja Declaration as an act of war. Some pundits say that governors have no locus standi to declare austerity when the pump price of crude is obeying the laws of gravity. Such insolence can only happen in a nation aping western-style democracy.
This may be one reason why the Irrational Assembly has failed to make each village and hamlet in the federation a state. Our economy can carry the luggage and if it has trouble doing it, it can hire dandoko and akwarikura from Kano central market. I don’t think the NLC should test the power of their excellences. I believe that minimum wage is neither payable nor collectable. In the years since it was imposed, the prices of bread, yams, nkwobi, danwake and amala has frozen never to rise again.
Governors have sacrificed so much for their states. A few examples would suffice to illustrate they should jostle for Nobel Prize in Governance and let nobody say that no such prize exists because it can be created. If the Alfred Nobel Committee has run out of ideas, it should ask state councils of the Naija Union of Journalists. The NUJ, especially, state councils successfully wrestled innovative titles from traditional ruiners who hitherto sold them to the highest bidder.
For instance, Kano has taken welfarism to the moon. Its Hisbah comb the town, looking for any female specie whose husband has died of natural and abnormal causes as well as miscegenated single girls left behind by avarice for boko or western education. Wherever they are found, Kano government matchmakers link them to willing suitors and they live happily ever after. How can Ganduje be asked to discontinue this important aspect of preparing the faithful for aljanna firdaus for the minimum wage?
It’s in realization that it is better to prepare people for the hereafter that Bauchi recently spent N55 million on Quranic recitation. What’s the essence of paying workers salaries if the people’s spiritual meter reads zero? Man divested of his link to his maker is nothing. What shall it profit a man who receives minimum wage on earth only to fail the test of reciting the Sahada on the gates of heaven? Besides, winners of the recitation now have cars, keke Napep, sewing and knitting machines and with these, they have added Bauchi to the list of industrialized states.
Nasarawa, whose governor’s convoy you would always do well to avoid on a narrow bridge, has offered greater things. He has signed the MOU for the Chinese to build a N20 billion Terminal 4 type airport in Lafia. This should divert busy commercial cargo from the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport to Lafia. Until last week, Abuja airport contested as hangar for Forbes-listed billionaires. This year, racism was taken a notch higher when the guys at Forbes de-listed some Naija billionaires from the honour roll. We shall soon retaliate. Which Kogi pauper would not give a year’s pay to go and watch a jumbo jet land in Ganaja if there was one? I am jealous for the good people of Nasarawa who will now join their friends in the Calabar Export Processing Zone employing thousands and making billions in taxes.
I don’t expect governors of Biafraud-states to pay only N18k; they should pay more to show the rest of us sentenced to live in the zoo how rosy things could be in Biafraud paradise. For now, states should pay less so that they can save money for their governor’s severance packages which usually include salary for life, a house at home and one in Abuja, two brand new cars every two years, medical treatment abroad for a wife and four kids.