TROUBLE AHEAD AS FG SAYS BUHARI YET TO DECIDE ON MINIMUM WAGE

Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, said he did not agree that national minimum wage should be under the federation, adding that most of the laws bequeathed to the country by the military had no bearing with the present realities and needed to be changed.

He also said the Act governing the Personal Income Tax should be reordered to give states powers to legislate on it.

"Just like for instance, I do not agree that national minimum wage should be under the federation; I think minimum wage should be done by each state according to the level of income. If you look at the 1963 Constitution, minimum wage was not in the exclusive list; it was added during the military rule," he said.

The governor said that some laws that were enacted during the military rule needed to be reviewed.

On internally generated revenues, El-Rufai said the state had grown its monthly generated revenue from N11.8 billion in 2015 to N26.5billion in 2017.

He said the state had so far collected N24.5 billion as at the end of October, 2018.

El-Rufai listed some of the steps taken to increase the state’s IGR were to establish a tax code, update and consolidate the state tax laws from 1914 to date, as well as engaging consultants’ service to reform the state tax agency.

The Governor of Edo State, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, who made a presentation on ‘Mobilising Domestic Financing for Development,’ said his state had increased its monthly IGR from N600million to N2.4 billion currently earned.

Obaseki said what the state did was to engage revenue agents, consolidate collection into a single account and to use technology to drive both assessment and collections.

He said that plan of the state was to grow its IGR by 50 per cent by the year.

“Hopefully within the next three months we will have doubled our IGR from its current N2 billion per month to about N44.5 billion per month.’’

Atiku Tasks President to Keep Promise to Workers

In a related development, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party

(PDP), Atiku, called Buhari to keep the promise he made to the organised labour to pay a new minimum wage.

Atiku said the call became necessary following a statement from the presidency denying Buhari’s earlier pledge to pay the new minimum wage of N30,000 agreed with the organised labour.

The candidate, also a former vice president, in a statement yesterday by his campaign organisation said that the approbation and reprobation was characteristic of the Buhari administration and was evidence of the lack of leadership at the very top that was putting the economy in peril.

Atiku stressed that both Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo, despite living

and feeding at the public expense, collect a hardship allowance of 50 per cent of their annual salary. But that the long suffering Nigerian workers, who were the main sufferers of the hardship caused by the incompetence of the administration, did not have any hardship allowance and were expected to live on the unlivable minimum wage of the Buhari government.

Atiku added that a government was only as reliable as its word and if its word was not reliable then nothing else about the government would be stable, saying that was why Nigeria suffered from a recession under this administration and was right now at risk of another recession.

He noted, “At the risk of repeating ourselves, we urge the Buhari administration to

note that Nigerian workers are the goose that lays the golden eggs that top members of this government are enjoying to the detriment of those laying the eggs.

“It is a testament to how badly we have treated our workforce over the last three years that Nigeria was officially declared the world headquarters for extreme poverty by the World Poverty Clock and the World Economic Forum.

“We can only change this by paying our workers a living wage as opposed to the starvation wages now paid to them by the Buhari administration.”

Atiku therefore called on Buhari to keep faith with the agreement his government freely reached with labour and affirm the new minimum wage.