On Workers’ Day, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Muhammadu Dingyadi, proudly declared that “no government has ever raised the take-home pay of workers like President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.” The boast? A jump from N30,000 to N70,000 minimum wage. But behind the fanfare of numbers lies a harsher truth: what good is N70,000 if it can barely last a family of three beyond a week in today’s Nigeria?
Inflation has not just reduced the value of the naira, it has battered the dignity of labour. While the minister tried to deflect criticism by citing global economic trends and insisting that “it’s not just Nigeria,” the local realities beg to differ. Nigeria’s brand of inflation is uniquely punishing, driven not just by market forces but by deliberate policy choices—removal of fuel subsidies, naira devaluation, and aggressive tariff hikes—that have made everyday survival feel like a luxury.
The truth of the matter is that N70,000 today buys less than N30,000 did a few years ago. Experts have rightly noted that touting this increase without factoring in purchasing power is misleading at best and dishonest at worst. What Nigerians need is not propaganda wages but policies that make their earnings meaningful.
This isn’t the first time my collaborators and I have called attention to this disconnect. In our December 2024 Newspot Nigeria column, titled: “Oil Wealth, Empty Pockets: Nigeria’s Fight for Equity,” co-authored with Yunus Sirajo Nasir and Dr. Mufutau A. Abdul-Yakeen, we detailed how inflation, deregulation, and foreign exchange pressure have decimated the real value of wages. Despite the so-called raise, a worker earning N70,000 in 2025 can afford only 3.5 litres of fuel per workday—barely enough to get by. We advocated for a N150,000 minimum wage tied to macroeconomic reforms such as localised refining, community-led microfinance, and targeted fuel subsidies. Without these, policy announcements are mere optics.
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And then there’s the corruption dilemma. Sometimes I genuinely feel for my brothers and sisters in anti-graft agencies. They’re expected to wage war on corruption in a system that is structurally rigged to push even the best of us toward it. In a country this unaffordable, how do you resist temptation when your paycheck doesn’t cover transport and food, let alone rent or school fees?
When survival becomes the daily currency of existence, the real enemy is not just the thief, but the system that makes thieving feel inevitable.
This government cannot claim to be fighting corruption while watching inflation ravage incomes and then acting surprised when integrity collapses. It’s a cruel contradiction: rewarding workers with “higher wages” while simultaneously undercutting those gains through reckless macroeconomic decisions.
So before officials applaud themselves for raising figures on paper, they should first ask the people earning those wages if anything has actually changed. That answer won’t come from polished Arise TV interviews—it will come from the market stalls, the pump price boards flashing N880 per litre, and the overcrowded danfo buses where the average Nigerian struggles just to survive each day.
. Abidemi is the Managing Editor of Newspot Nigeria.
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