ABUJA, Nigeria – The presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress and former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, GCON, has thrown his full weight behind organized labor’s push for a substantial upward review of the national minimum wage, demanding that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu immediately raise the wage floor to reflect the skyrocketing cost of food, transportation, housing, and electricity, labor and political correspondents reported in Abuja on Sunday night, September 27, 2026.
In a strongly worded national policy statement titled “Increase Minimum Wage, Now!” issued through the Director of Strategic Communications of the ADC Presidential Campaign Council, Phrank Shaibu, the former vice president accused the federal administration of presiding over a punishing economic squeeze where working families earn nominal wage increases on paper only to be pushed deeper into absolute poverty by hyperinflation.
Okay News reports that Atiku framed the labor dispute as a moral and economic failure on the part of the executive branch, arguing that no developing nation can achieve industrial productivity while its workforce is impoverished by state policies.
“The Nigerian worker is the engine of this country’s productive life, yet Tinubu expects that engine to run without fuel,” Atiku declared in the official statement. “A worker leaves home before dawn, gives the country a full day’s labour, then stands at a bus stop wondering whether the money left will pay the fare home or put food on the family table. That is a national disgrace. You cannot work people to exhaustion, pay them into poverty and lecture them about productivity. If a full month’s wage cannot sustain a worker’s family, government has failed the people who keep this country moving.”
The ADC presidential flagbearer explained that the systemic shock caused by the sudden elimination of the petrol subsidy has had a compounding inflationary effect across every consumer market in Nigeria, effectively neutralizing the recent adjustment of the national minimum wage from ₦30,000 to ₦70,000.
“Petrol does not stay at the pump,” Atiku noted. “Its price follows the farmer to market, enters the baker’s oven and appears in the fare a parent pays to take a child to school. Government then announces a wage increase and watches those costs swallow it before the month has begun. At ₦1,400 to ₦1,500 a litre, the entire ₦70,000 monthly minimum wage buys just 50 litres of petrol. What does the worker take home to feed the children? What pays the rent? What gets that worker back to work on Monday?”
Atiku compared Nigeria’s statutory compensation structure with peer African and oil-exporting economies based on mid-2026 conversion rates, highlighting that monthly wage baselines stand at approximately ₦213,000 in Libya, ₦245,000 in Algeria, ₦302,000 in Equatorial Guinea, and ₦351,000 in Gabon, demonstrating that Nigerian workers remain significantly undercompensated relative to the country’s resource wealth.
He challenged President Tinubu to cease protracted, inconclusive tripartite negotiations with the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, demanding clear and decisive executive action before the current administration concludes its tenure.
“If he has no intention of raising workers’ pay, he should say so plainly and stop stringing the Nigeria Labour Congress and other labour leaders along,” Atiku said. “Nigerian workers deserve an answer, not another round of meetings that ends where it began. Tinubu has eight months left in this term. Nigerian workers cannot be told to endure eight more months of hunger while his government debates whether their wages are enough. He must raise the wage floor and bring down the costs crushing families.”
Outlining the economic platform of the ADC ahead of the 2027 general elections, Atiku pledged that his administration would commence the statutory upward review of the minimum wage floor from his first day in office, coupling wage adjustments with targeted price-stabilization mechanisms.
He detailed plans to institute a capped and transparent domestic production subsidy for petroleum products refined locally by Nigerian refineries and sold domestically, ensuring that public support generates direct, verifiable price reductions at retail pumps.
“If we are serious about repairing the damage, better pay must be accompanied by lower living costs,” the former vice president added. “Anything less leaves the Nigerian worker as the guinea pig in Tinubu’s economic experiment. Nigerians do not eat FAAC figures. A full treasury is no answer to an empty kitchen. The test of this government is whether the men and women who work all month can live on what they earn. A living wage must buy a living. It is not a privilege; it is a basic right. Tinubu has made life painfully expensive. I will make life affordable again.”
