The Social Democratic Party’s (SDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, Barr Adewole Adebayo, has said what the workers need is social investment and not the wage increase organised labour is demanding.
Adebayo made the statement amid the breakdown of negotiations for the upward review of the wages of workers between the government and the labour union.
He argued that if social investments were provided, the question of who is a worker or who is not would not even arise because the minimum of what Nigerians would expect from the government would have been made available.
He noted that even if the N615,000 minimum wage demand by the labour force is granted by the government, it won’t get them anywhere because the intervention is only at the level of pricing labour when the real thing should be the amount of social investment available in the country.
“The intervention we are making is that you are solving the problem of the pricing of labour. You cannot solve the problem there because it is too narrow. Where you can solve the problem is the amount of social investment you need to make in the economy, such that the employed, the semi-employed and the unemployed, who are either skilled, highly skilled, or low skilled, will have a minimum floor below which you cannot fall,” he stated.
He further stressed that it is not the amount of money one collects that matters, but the purchasing power of such an amount of money.
He said: “During the Second Republic, all the governors understood these social investment elements, and that is why all the state governments had their own school boards, scholarship boards, and water resources, such that water gets to houses even in rural areas. What we are doing now is monetary government, where we share money and assume that there is availability.
“For example, Mr Osifo, the president of the TUC, is assuming that because you are collecting three times more money in FAAC now than in 2019, there is availability, not knowing that seven times the cost now is not up to what you were collecting before. This is the illusion of money because it is not the amount of money you collect that matters, but the purchasing power of the money and the allocative efficiency in economics.”
He decried the lingering fuel crisis in the country, which, according to him, has worsened the socio-economic situation of many households in Nigeria, while urging President Tinubu to broaden his governance philosophy to address the fuel scarcity.
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