Akwa Ibom State Government has announced a new minimum wage of N21,000, surpassing the N18,900 paid by the Federal Government. Governor Godswill Akpabio who announced this on Tuesday during the May Day celebration in Uyo, however, said the state decided to pay that high, not necessarily because of the strike the workers embarked on for three weeks in January this year, but for his resolve to make the workers happy and more productive.
The new salary regime which was signed on Monday at the State Banquet Hall between organized labour and the governor and called Consolidated Akwa Ibom State Enhanced Salary Structure and would not only take care of upward review of salaries, but also of promotion of directors to the level G17 even when they are not officially designated Permanent Secretaries.
Akpabio said his administration would continue to honour workers since he belong to labour not by employment but by birth and the fact that his mother instilled the dignity of labour in him right from childhood.
He described this year’s May Day celebration as eventful because it is the year that the state would celebrate its silver jubilee anniversary. He challenged labour to take stock of its activities in the last 25 years to decide whether they had keyed into the dreams and aspirations of the founding fathers of the state.
He said this year’s May Day theme which has to do with employment, food, education and security had already been captured by his administration’s free and compulsory education, employment of thousands of youths into civil service and granting of agric loans to youths and women to the tune of N500,000 each.
The state chairman of the NLC, Comrade Unyime Usoro, while appreciating the state government for its magnanimity in forgiving labour’s action of going on strike and still approving the new minimum wage, however said, this year’s theme: Right to Employment, Food and Education: Panacea to Insecurity captures the concern of the Nigerian workers.
“The menace of Boko Haram in the North and the re-emergence of insurgency in the Niger delta has brought to the fore the need for the Nigerian government to look beyond equipping the security agencies, setting up counter terrorism squads and joint task forces all over the place but to concentrate in tackling the root causes of these maladies.
“We believe that the increasing rates of insecurity in the country can be tackled if the unprecedented high rate of unemployment occasioned by disastrous economic mismanagement by successive governments, leading to the closures of many manufacturing companies are checked through a deliberate effort to create employment.
“We believe that food insecurity is as dangerous as insecurity posed by Boko Haram, since as the saying goes, a hungry man is an angry man,” the NLC boss said.
