FG’s failure to make fresh offer stalls minimum wage talks

Recall that President Bola Tinubu had on Tuesday, given a marching order to the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, to prepare cost implications of the new minimum wage and present an affordable, sustainable and realistic figure to him yesterday, saying government’s new offer must be ready by yesterday as the basis of negotiation with Labour.

The President asked the minister to come up with the cost implications of a new minimum wage and present an affordable, sustainable and realistic figure within two days.

He further directed all involved in the negotiations to expedite action so that everything on the new minimum wage would be concluded as soon as possible.

However, at the resumed negotiation meeting which started at about 3:30 pm yesterday, Vanguard gathered that nothing much could be achieved, following the inability or failure of the Federal Government to present a new offer.

A source at the meeting said: “The meeting was adjourned to give the Minister of Finance time to meet the deadline given to him by the President to present cost implications to him.

“We just deliberated generally and then they (the Federal Government team) said we needed to adjourn because they needed to get to the President. You know he (President Bola Tinubu) gave them an ultimatum to give him the cost implications.

‘’So we could understand that they did not have anything to give us since they had not given the President the cost implications. Those present at the meeting were the Minister of Finance, Minister of Budget and Economic Planning and the Minister of State for Labour. So, we will be resuming negotiation tomorrow (today) by 2pm.”

On whether the Finance Minister gave any assurance of getting the President’s mandate before today’s meeting, the source said: “They do not have a choice, we are not bothered about them. We do not think they have a choice because they cannot disobey the President.

“If they decide to disobey the President or if the President decides to renege on his promise, we all know the consequences”

On Monday’s meeting with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, SGF, he said: “They said they had the mandate of the President to conclude negotiation within one week. So that was what happened.

“Even as we went on strike, the intention was not to destroy the system, the essence of the strike is to push them to the wall to make promises because the further you do things that are very adverse to the economy, the worse things get.

“So, we are conscious of our responsibility to the fact that you don’t throw the baby away with the bathwater. But people will not understand. They think we want maximum damage. No. At the end of the day, the workers are asking for pay, if there is no economy, where will they get the pay?

“So the important thing is to keep pushing the government until we extract the maximum benefit from them.”