Don’t let your mind race to Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour’s bungled Yoruba proverb. He is not the only one who focuses on scratching an itch while ignoring leprosy.
There was once a man with leprosy who developed an itch on his left elbow.
He scratched it.
Ahhhh. Sweet relief.
He scratched again.
Then he summoned his children and announced happily that his treatment was working.
His eldest son looked at the disappearing fingers, the festering sores and the disease steadily eating their father’s body and asked, “Baba, but this is leprosy, not a skin disease.”
The old man frowned.
“Can’t you see that the itching has stopped. That is progress, right?”
That, sometimes, is how Nigeria approaches the welfare of its workers, and people.
Every few years, inflation arrives with a cutlass. Food prices run mad. Rent climbs the wall. Transport fares develop wings.
Electricity tariff moves upstairs. School fees relocate to the penthouse. A bag of cement starts behaving like a designer handbag.
Then everybody remembers the minimum wage. Like it’s an annual Orisa Oko festival.
Increase it!
Labour threatens strike. Government threatens no-work-no-pay. Committees are quickly constituted. Governors complain.
Negotiations stretch into the night. Eventually, a new figure is announced and we congratulate ourselves.
The itch has been scratched.
Meanwhile, the leprosy is eating the body.
Nigeria’s first statutory national minimum wage was N125 monthly in 1981. It rose to N250 in 1991. There were further wage adjustments in the late 1990s and 2000, including different federal and state figures.
Then came N18,000 in 2011, N30,000 in 2019 and N70,000 in 2024.
Look at those numbers again.
From N125 to N70,000!
If salary figures alone created prosperity, Nigerian workers should be one of the richest in the world.
Are they?
That is the question we conveniently refuse to ask.
What exactly is an increased minimum wage supposed to fix if everything that consumes the wage increases faster than the wage itself?
Let us take toothpaste.
Will the Federal Government summon toothpaste manufacturers and command them to reduce their prices because the minimum wage has increased?
Will a new N250,000 minimum wage frighten palm oil into becoming cheaper?
Will garri salute the National Minimum Wage Act and retreat?
Will landlords receive a circular from Abuja instructing them to reduce rents?
Consider my own hypothetical landlord.
He built his house when a bag of cement was N1,800. Now he needs to renovate it today when cement costs N14,000 per bag.
The plumber has increased his charges.
The electrician has increased his. Paint has gone up. Roofing sheets have gone up. Transportation has gone up. Diesel has gone up. Then his tenant arrives waving the minimum-wage law.
“Sir, government has increased my salary. Please reduce my rent.”
Very funny. How?
The landlord is not Father Christmas. His own costs have risen too.
That is the part of the wage conversation we keep avoiding. Income is only one side of the welfare equation. Cost is the other.
If you increase my salary by 50 per cent while the cost of keeping myself alive rises by 80 per cent, you have not made me richer. You have simply given me a bigger bundle of naira with which to buy fewer things. And we have been running this race for decades, making no progress, running in a frenzy circle. What sane man does that?
It is time to stop asking only, “How much does a worker earn?”
Let us ask, “What can his earnings buy?” That is the question that matters.
Take a young graduate in Lagos earning minimum wage.
Let us even assume he receives every kobo promptly.
Where does he live?
A modest one-room self-contained apartment in some parts of Lagos can be advertised at around #1.5 million a year, before agreement fee, agency fee, caution fee and the other mysterious fees Nigerian tenants encounter.
Our graduate earns N70,000 monthly.
His entire annual minimum wage is N840,000.
Read that again.
N840,000.
The rent alone can swallow more than his entire year’s basic minimum wage.
He has not eaten.
He has not factored in transportation.
He has not bought toothpaste.
He has not sent N10,000 to Mama.
He has not fallen sick.
God forbid that he should fall in love.
Marriage is clearly an extracurricular activity at that salary.
And please don’t let his phone spoil or be stolen.
May his landlord not increase the rent.
What if his younger sister gains admission into the university or needs to rewrite UTME or WASCE?
Yet we keep discussing minimum wage as if changing one number on a salary sheet can cure a structurally expensive country.
It cannot.
The problem is bigger.
Nigeria needs a minimum cost of living conversation, not just a minimum wage conversation. If our governors do not invest in local farming, infrastructure, and supply chains, any extra money given to workers is immediately exported to foreign farmers.
Can we produce enough of what we eat?
Nigeria is an agricultural country that still spends enormous sums importing what it eats. We export some agricultural commodities, certainly, but we also import substantial quantities of wheat and other food products.
A country that imports its food is one whose stomach is held hostage by global shipping containers and foreign farmers. A government who raises the minimum wage without fixing the food supply is simply handing workers a longer ladder while the ground beneath them is actively sinking.
Food cannot become cheap when farming itself is expensive.
The farmer needs fertiliser.
He needs seedlings.
He needs labour.
He needs security.
He needs to transport produce over bad roads.
Sometimes bandits levy him.
Sometimes floods visit.
Sometimes herders visit.
Sometimes government officials visit.
Everybody visits the farmer except the things that will make farming easier.
Then we expect cheap tomatoes in Mile 12.
From where?
We need to ask the same question about unemployment.
And here, we must be careful with statistics.
Nigeria changed its unemployment methodology in 2022/2023 to align more closely with the International Labour Organisation standards, so today’s headline unemployment rate cannot honestly be placed beside the old 33.3 per cent figure from 2020 and treated as a straight trend.
But there is another statistic that tells an important story: only a small fraction of working Nigerians are in formal wage employment. Millions survive through tiny businesses, farming, trading and informal work.
What about those millions of Nigerians who do not work for government?
So each time we fight a national war over minimum wage, we should remember the woman frying akara by the roadside.
Who increases her salary?
Nobody.
She pays the higher transport fare. She buys the expensive beans. She buys cooking oil at the new price. Her children’s school increases fees. Her landlord increases rent.
Then the civil servant who buys her akara gets a salary increase.
What does Madam Akara do?
She increases the price of akara.
Congratulations.
We have successfully moved the money around.
This is why productivity must enter the conversation.
A country cannot sustainably legislate itself into prosperity by increasing wages without increasing production.
It must produce more electricity, more food, build more refineries and efficient mass transit.
Raising a minimum wage costs the government nothing but ink and paper. The real work is in building a domestic economy that benefits the voters. That real work is what our federal and state governments must focus their energies on. Enough of just commissioning roads and bridges. Let them commission farms, modern agricultural tools. Let them work on mortgages and affordable housing.
Let them reduce the cost of doing business and create environment that supports businesses.
Secure farms.
Fix farm roads.
Make public schools good enough for the children of civil servants.
Make public hospitals good enough that a worker does not need to empty his savings when his wife needs surgery.
Then watch what happens to the worker’s salary.
It will begin to breathe.
A worker earning N100,000 who spends N10,000 on transport may be better off than one earning 150,000 who spends N50,000 getting to work.
A worker earning N150,000 whose children attend decent affordable schools may live better than another earning N250,000 and spending N120,000 monthly on school fees.
That is what standard of living means.
It is not the size of your salary alert.
It is the life the alert can buy.
There is another uncomfortable question.
What happens when a civil servant’s legitimate income cannot legitimately sustain the basic requirements of his life?
Transport. Housing. Children’s education.
Health care. Food.
We can preach integrity from Monday until Friday, but on Saturday reality will knock.
This does not excuse corruption.
Stealing public money remains stealing.
But a system that pays people wages that bear little relationship to the legitimate cost of living while placing public resources under their control is designing temptation into its architecture.
Then we act surprised when files acquire prices or are kidnapped.
Signatures acquire tariffs.
Contracts acquire percentages.
Approvals need “something for the boys.”
No. Increasing minimum wage alone will not cure corruption either.
We have increased wages before.
Corruption did not pack its bags.
Inflation did not resign.
Housing did not suddenly become affordable.
Public transportation did not become comfortable.
Our hospitals did not become Johns Hopkins.
Our schools did not become Oxford.
The Nigerian worker simply collected his increased salary and discovered, shortly afterwards, that the market had been waiting for him.
That is the tragedy.
The market always hears about the increase.
Before the first alert lands, the pepper seller has heard.
The landlord has heard.
The bus driver has heard.
The school proprietor has heard.
Even the barber somehow knows.
Oga, everything don cost
And truly, everything has cost.
That is why this is not an argument against better wages.
Workers deserve decent wages. In fact, many Nigerian workers are scandalously underpaid.
A higher wage is an analgesic, not surgery.
It relieves pain.
It does not remove the tumour.
What we need is an economy where one’s salary can do normal things; where a graduate can rent a modest room without giving up two years’ income to a landlord; where a teacher can take a bus to work without mentally calculating whether trekking back home is better than going to bed on an empty stomach.
Working parents should not need three side hustles to pay school fees.
Buying a small television set shouldn’t be a capital project requiring feasibility studies and prayers.
When all or most of these become part of our lives, we can talk about wages that make sense.
Until then, every few years, we will gather again.
Labour will demand more.
Government will offer less.
Governors will cry insolvency.
Workers will threaten strike.
A committee will be inaugurated.
Television stations will organise panels.
Eventually, another impressive number will emerge.
N100,000.
N150,000.
N200,000.
We will clap.
And the market will adjust its chair, clear its throat and say:
“Welcome. I have been expecting you.”
Because you cannot cure an expensive country simply by printing a more expensive pay slip.
You cure it by making the essentials of life cheaper to produce and easier to access.
Minimum wage is merely where it itches and for more than four decades, we have been scratching.
Perhaps it is finally time to treat the leprosy.
But in case we have still not learnt our lesson, the market has adjusted its chair, cleared its throat and is ready to tear any new minimum wage to shreds.