By Sunday Ani
Amid the raging arguments between the government and the organised labour on the need to review upwards the minimum wage, the Social Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo has said what the labour should be asking for is the provision of social investment and not wage increase.
He argued that if social investments are provided, the question of who is a worker or who is not would not even arise because the minimum that the citizens expect from the government as enshrined in Chapter 2 of the country’s constitution would have been made available.
He noted that even if the N615,000 minimum wage demand by the labour is granted by the government, it won’t get them anywhere because the intervention is only at the level of pricing labour when the real thing should be the amount of social investment available in the country.
“The intervention we are making is that you are solving the problem of the pricing of labour. You cannot solve the problem there because it is too narrow a space. Where you can solve the problem is the amount of social investments you need to make in the economy, such that the employed, the semi employed and the unemployed, who are either skilled, highly skilled or low skilled, will have a minimum floor below which you cannot fall,” he stated.
He further stressed that it is not the amount of money one collects that matters but the purchasing power of such an amount of money.
He said: “During the second Republic, all the governors understood these social investment elements, and that is why all the state governments had their own school boards, scholarship boards, and water resources, such that water gets to houses even in rural areas. What we are doing now is monetary government where we share money and we assume that there is availability.
“For example, Mr. Osifo, who is an important person in Nigerian leadership, is assuming that because you are collecting three times more money in FAAC now than in 2019, that there is availability, not knowing that seven times the cost now is not up to what you were collecting before. This is the illusion of money because it is not the amount of money you collect that matters, but the purchasing power of the money and the allocative efficiency in economics.”
He also decried the lingering fuel crisis in the country, which according to him has worsened the socio-economic situation of many households in Nigeria, stressing that what President Bola Tinubu should at the moment to address the fuel crisis is to broaden his governance philosophy. He noted that this is the time for the president to jettison his political party’s manifesto and follow the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. “He should not follow the party manifesto. He should follow the constitution. He should know that if you want to be president, you must follow Chapter 2 of the constitution of Nigeria,” he said.