President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday assented to the N30,000 National Minimum Wage Bill, thereby ending lingering controversies that had trailed the bill over the past months.
A source in the Presidency who confirmed that the President signed the bill into law this afternoon, said that the Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang, would brief journalists on the Act later today.
With the President’s assent to the bill, it has now become one of legislations of the National Assembly.
It would be recalled that the Executive had transmitted the bill to the National Assembly on January 22 with N27,000 recommended as the national minimum wage but the National Assembly increased the figure to N30,000.
Before then, organized labour and state governments had been embroiled in a running battle over complaints by the governors about their inability to pay the minimum wage.
But then, after over one year of running battle to get the bill passed, the Senate on March 20 this year approved N30,000 as the new national minimum wage to prevent nationwide industrial crisis.
The acting Chairman of the Senate Ad hoc committee on the National Minimum Wage Bill, Sen. Francis Alimikhena, who delivered the committee’s report at plenary, said that any company that failed to pay the proposed wage would be sanctioned with a fine of N75,000.
To mitigate the fiscal burden on state governments, the committee also recommended immediate review of the revenue sharing formula.
In addition, the committee urged the ministers of Finance and Budget and National Planning to compute and forward the actual amount required for the implementation of the new minimum wage at the federal level to the National Assembly so that it could be included in the 2019 budget.
