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President Muhammadu Buhari has directed all parties negotiating the consequential adjustments of salaries of workers arising from the new N30, 000 national minimum wages to conclude work before December 31, 2019.
Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, made the disclosure yesterday when he received a team of media workers in Abuja.
He warned that anything to the contrary would put pressure on state governments resulting in their inability to offset the arrears that had begun counting since April 18 this year when the bill was assented to by the President.
His words: “The states are waiting for the conclusion of the consequential adjustments. It is only proper for us to fast-track negotiations so that the states will not have too much backlog to pay when the process concludes.
“We have our own budget for the new wage in the 2019 appropriation act, and we are going to also budget for it in the 2020 document. So, the sooner we conclude at the federal level and the Joint Negotiating Councils take it from there and negotiate with the states, the better for everybody.
“If we spill this into next year, I am not sure how many states will be able to pay the backlog which might likely lead us to another round of negotiations.”
The minister hinted that the government would raise a presidential committee on the workload of civil servants with a view to adjusting their allowances to commensurate with their tasks.
Admitting that the focus of his ministry was to create jobs, Ngige, nonetheless, added that it must equally put policies in place to protect existing ones.
He noted that unemployment was reflecting on the various social vices, including banditry, kidnapping cultism and agitations across the federation.
“When you hear about Boko Haram, that is one of the symptoms. When you hear about banditry and IPOB, they are equally symptoms of joblessness. The President has decided that we must fight unemployment. We have to fight the scourge because the indices are terrible and that does not call for cheers. We have to wear our thinking cap and take our country out of the doldrums,” the former governor of Anambra State stated.
Ngige stressed that the ministry would continue to move against redundancy in the oil and gas sector and other key industries, just as he promised job stability and a friendly environment.
