The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) has commended President Bola Tinubu on the breakthrough in the negotiation of national minimum wage with the organised labour, while looking forward to the promised assistance to the private sector for the implementation. Director General of MAN, Segun Ajayi-Kadir, who stated this in a statement made available to Vanguard on Thursday, also called for the exception of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) for compliance. His said “we commend the President for achieving this breakthrough and look forward to the promised assistance. On the side of the private sector, we should hold on to the promise of the President that the federal government will find a way to assist us to pay the minimum wage agreed with labour.
“In this regards, I would assume that reference would be made to the demands made by the Organised Private Sector (OPS) at the concluding stage of the tripartite negotiations.” He further said “we had intimated the committee with the challenges confronting businesses in the private sector and that there was the need to ameliorate those challenges in order to improve the capacity of our members to pay the minimum wage that we offered. We maintained that those binding constraints may constitute impediments to the full compliance of our member when the minimum wage is signed into law. So, the assumption is that the President will give expedited consideration to those challenges and take necessary steps to address them. This will go a long way in onboarding the private sector in the new agreement on the minimum wage.” To this end, Ajayi-Kadir said that the OPS demanded the following: “SMEs and MSMEs should be exempted from compliance in view of their incapacity and prevailing operational challenges; CBN redemptions of all validly transacted outstanding forex forwards for companies in the productive sector; and the reversal of increase in electricity tariffs or only 100% increase in electricity tariff for minimum of 20 hours of supply.”
Other are: Duty exemption on imported conversion kits and government subsidy on procurement of same; freeze on introduction of new taxes on businesses for the next five years; and fixed rate of N800 for the assessment of import duty on all production inputs, amongst others. Recall that President Tinubu on Thursday approved a new minimum wage of N70,000 for Nigerian workers and pledged to review the national minimum wage law every three years. He also promised to find ways to assist the private sector and the sub-nationals to pay the minimum wage. He said that with the development, it should be considered that the long drawn negotiations have come to an end, leading to accelerated conclusion of the issue of minimum wage.
