As expected, workers under the aegis of the Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council held a three-day warning strike on Friday. The JNPSNC had repeatedly warned that it would down tools if the Federal Government failed to heed its September 30 ultimatum. The unions are demanding negotiations over the rising cost of petroleum products, a wage award and a new national minimum wage.
Nigeria can ill-afford another workers’ strike.
The JNPSNC, comprising eight public-sector unions, had demanded that the Federal Government slash petrol to N500 per litre and introduce other measures to cushion the crushing hardship confronting Nigerians. The Nigeria Labour Congress has also made similar demands.
Considering the impact of the Middle East conflict on crude oil prices, N500 per litre is a difficult target without substantial government intervention. But the anger driving the workers’ action cannot be wished away.
The purchasing power of the Nigerian worker has reached a critical point. The N70,000 minimum wage can barely meet the needs of an average worker. With a bag of rice costing between N58,000 and N68,000, petrol selling for as much as N1,450 per litre in some locations, and transport fares, school fees and rent relentlessly rising, the indicators of a bleak existence are obvious.
The World Bank estimates that about 140,000 Nigerians are living below the poverty line. The government increased the minimum wage from N30,000 to N70,000 in 2025, but steep inflation has rapidly eroded the value of the increase.
That workers have reached the point of threatening industrial action is itself a measure of how badly things have deteriorated.
It is therefore jarring to note the recent comments attributed to Edo State Governor, Monday Okpebholo, and the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Heineken Lokpobiri. Both men, after separate trips to the United Kingdom and the United States, argued that, after converting the cost of petrol in those countries to naira, they found fuel cheaper in Nigeria.
Such comparisons are misleading because they conveniently ignore the most important variable: income.
The cost of a commodity means little when considered in isolation. What matters to the ordinary worker is how much of his or her income is required to buy it.
For instance, using the figures in the original comparison, Nigeria’s N70,000 minimum wage converts to roughly $52–$58, depending on the exchange rate used.
By contrast, the monthly equivalent of the UK National Living Wage was put at about $2,813, while the US federal minimum wage translated to approximately $1,255 per month.
The disparity becomes even starker when the figures are converted back into naira. At an illustrative exchange rate of about N1,340 to the dollar, the Nigerian minimum wage of N70,000 remains just $56, while $2,813 represents about N3.77 million and $1,255 about N1.68 million.
That is the comparison government officials should be making.
The UK’s National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and above is now £12.71 an hour, while the US federal minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour, although several US states have considerably higher statutory rates.
Consider the cost of filling a 50-litre tank. In the original comparison, petrol for such a tank consumed about 3.3 per cent of a monthly minimum wage in the UK and 4.2 per cent in the US. For a Nigerian worker, the same exercise could consume more than 84 per cent of the monthly minimum wage.
That is the point being missed or ignored.
Exchange-rate arithmetic without purchasing-power analysis is therefore a poor basis for comparing living standards.
Government officials should stop making such false comparisons. Citizens do not live on exchange rates. They live on wages. It is the purchasing power of those wages that determines whether a family can eat, pay rent, send children to school, commute to work or afford healthcare.
President Bola Tinubu, in his Independence Day broadcast titled “From Reform to Prosperity,” again promised better days ahead for Nigerians.
But promises of future prosperity cannot substitute for measures that address today’s hardship.
The President’s speech defended his administration’s macroeconomic reforms, including the removal of the petrol subsidy and the floating of the naira, while painting an optimistic picture of their eventual benefits.
Yet Nigerians need more than a defence of reforms. They need concrete short-term measures, clear timelines and measurable interventions to address food inflation, transport costs, unemployment and collapsing purchasing power.
While on vacation in Europe, Tinubu had promised a reduction in transport fares by October 1, but reports indicate that implementation has largely fallen short.
Meanwhile, the hardship confronting ordinary Nigerians cannot be wished away while the country’s leaders continue to luxuriate in affluence at government expense.
Tinubu must urgently roll out a credible microeconomic relief and recovery plan. If the government is benefiting from higher oil prices arising from the Middle East conflict, which also puts pressure on petrol prices, a portion of that windfall should be channelled back into the economy through targeted production incentives and measures to reduce the cost of essential goods and services.
With Nigeria now possessing substantial domestic refining capacity, the benefits should increasingly be reflected at the pump.
The government must also confront waste and the cost of governance. It should examine examples such as Abia State Governor Alex Otti’s claim that his administration reduced the state’s N191 billion debt by 75 per cent through a 20 per cent cut in the cost of governance.
More importantly, the Tinubu administration must recognise that endless borrowing is not an economic strategy. Every new loan adds to the debt burden which already impoverished citizens have to repay.
The warning strike should therefore not be treated as another labour dispute to be negotiated away. It is a warning about the widening distance between economic policy and the daily reality of Nigerian workers.
The Federal Government must return to the negotiating table with urgency and credibility.
Workers cannot indefinitely be asked to bear the cost of economic adjustment while prosperity remains a promise somewhere in the future.
A government cannot demand patience from people who can no longer afford to live. If the reforms are meant to produce prosperity, Nigerians need to survive long enough to experience it.
