Facebook user share- NIGERIA’S POVERTY IS LEGAL

Kids

Couple of days ago, Nigeria was declared as the poverty capital of the world, overtaking India. Now most people wonder how a country blessed with so much resources could be that poor. I am hoping this will shed some light.

In Nigeria, the minimum wage is N18,000; this means that any employer who manages to pay as much as N18,000 is not breaking the law, assuming anyone cared about upholding this law. Now to put things in better perspective, N18,000 is $50.04.

The poverty line as reviewed by Worldbank in 2015 stands at $1.90 a day. Thus, anyone who lives on less that $1.90 a day is living below the poverty line. Simply put; this person is poor. Since $50.04 a month amounts to $1.66 a day, it can be said that the poverty faced by Nigerians is written in the laws of the land and endorsed by the government.

Most interesting is the fact that this minimum wage law is not enforced. Some state governments, since the passage of this law in 2011, stated that the amount was too much for them to pay. Most of these states have since paid salaries irregularly and a good number are owing months of unpaid salaries.

The private sector is much worse. People running SMEs do not care about the minimum wage law. They pay just as little as someone is willing to take. Big corporates are not left out of this. Cleaners in some banks for instance earn much less than the minimum wage. Whilst the banks may be excused on the grounds that the cleaners are not direct employees but outsourced employees, the banks should at the very least pay attention to how much the outsourcing agencies with which they deal pay the actual workers.

Need I talk about teachers especially in primary schools? The list of professions that offer less than this paltry $50.04 a month is endless. So do not think about the Nigerian poor as people living in distant rural areas. The poor are in your face daily; They are your children’s teacher, you graduated with some of them from the university, some of them sit at the tills of our favourite shopping malls, and the list goes on and on.

I believe we have come to that point where we can no longer ignore these dark realities that face us. We need to come together and propose actionable ways to fix our country. We need to ask questions such as; can the primary schools afford to pay more? Can SMEs afford better wages and still stay afloat? How can we run a system that puts money in the pockets of governments and entrepreneurs so they can in turn pay living wages to their workers? Of course this alone cannot fix us, but it will definitely make a good starting point.