As a parting shot for year 2018, Nigerian governors on Monday reiterated their rejection of the demand by the Nigerian Labour Congress for the payment of N30,000 as minimum wage to workers, insisting that they had other competing needs to contain with and would therefore not use more than 50 percent of their income for settling workers.
In a strongly worded statement made available to Vanguard on Monday, the Nigerian Governor’s Forum, made it clear that they would have paid the N30,000 but regretted their inability to do so due to what they described as ‘times are hard’ and because of financial constraints and other limitations that have tied the hands of many states.
The statement, which was signed by the spokesman for the NGF, Abdulrazque Bello-Barkindo, was in response to a claim by the NLC that governors were simply refusing to pay the new wage and that those who diverted billions shelled out by the federal government as bailout funds should be probed.
The governors castigated the NLC for demanding that their financial books should be made known to the union, saying that having shown their financial status to the President during two meetings on the minimum wage, there were under no obligation to show same to the NLC.
The governors also stated pointedly that having made a marginal increment of N22.500 from the current N18,000, they had nothing more to add to the minimum wage and it was left for the NLC to consider and accept that as what was available and possible for now.
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