The position of some states in Nigeria as regards their claims of not being able to pay the N18, 000 minimum wage is inimical to industrial peace and increased productivity, a former management consultant, Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity, Chief Seth Maiyekogbon, has said.

Maiyekogbon, who argued that it was untrue that the states lacked the resources to pay the minimum wage, spoke in an interview with our correspondent in Ilorin on Wednesday, at a seminar with the theme, “Minimum wage: Its challenges for human resources practitioners.” It was organised by the Kwara State chapter of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management of Nigeria.

Maiyekogbon said that with good management, diversification of income base and zero tolerance to corruption, the states could comfortably pay the minimum wage.

He urged employees to demand for the payment of the minimum wage, adding that workers could only sustain or even increase productivity with good motivation.

He said, “I am not satisfied with the minimum wage. It is a farce. What is N600 per day? For an average Nigerian worker, it is nothing compared with when people steal billions of naira.

“They (states) can pay the minimum wage. The workers should demand that they pay the minimum wage. We should expect crime and industrial disharmony if the state governments do not pay the minimum wage. Prices are on the increase everyday and workers die in silence and we are tolerating it. In a civilised society, it would not have been tolerated.

He added, “You cannot get high productivity even with this minimum wage. It is not motivating because the salary increase is not being tailored towards solving the problem of Nigerian workers.”

The state CIPM Chairman, Mallam Mohammed Aliyu, urged the Kwara State Government to ensure the payment of the minimum wage. He also advised managers of organisations at various levels, both in the private and public sectors, to devise other ways of creating motivation and welfare programmes for their workers, adding that staff training should be one of the motivation strategies.

He said that the N18, 000 minimum wage, though unsatisfactory, was a step forward and better. He said there were states that were paying some of their employees as little as N7,000. He argued that a worker earning N7,000 before now would be paid N18,000, which would help him to adjust better to the prevailing economic situation.

He, however, said that there were fears that some industries or companies with less than 50 employees might not comply with the minimum wage payment.

According to him, most of those companies are spending heavily on power generation. This, he said, made their overhead costs to be too high for them to make profit to accommodate and sustain the minimum wage.