The Executive Director of Lux Terra Leadership Foundation, Rev. Fr. George Ehusani, has openly criticised the Nigerian government’s approach to negotiating a new national minimum wage from the current N30,000.00.
Speaking on Sunday, Fr. Ehusani expressed his deep frustration with the ongoing controversy over the issue, saying something must be wrong with antagonists of a higher and better minimum wage for Nigerian workers.
“I have been sick of this problem. I have been sick of this controversy over living wage or minimum wage,” he stated. “I believe that something is seriously wrong with the heads of our leaders. How can anyone who earns N200,000, N300,000, N400,000, N500,000—let alone those earning N1million or N2million—go to sleep in good conscience every day? How can they sleep soundly and then sit in a boardroom to discuss the sustainability or otherwise of paying N60,000 to the poorest of workers?”
Fr. Ehusani condemned the disparity in incomes, highlighting the plight of low-wage workers who struggle to meet basic needs such as food, rent, medical care, and school fees for their children.
He questioned the moral integrity of those who earn substantial salaries yet debate the feasibility of a modest increase for the less fortunate.
“How wicked, how blind can we be to think that God will bless our country while we commit this crime against humanity?” he asked. “Poor people are dying because they have no money to cure malaria, and we voted N500 million to meet and debate about paying N60,000 to the poor.”
He drew parallels between Nigeria’s economic inequality and the societal structure depicted in George Orwell’s satirical allegorical novella, ‘Animal Farm’, saying: “Nigeria is one of the most unequal societies in the entire world, a society where we have conspicuously rich people and people who are in deplorable, dehumanising poverty. Anyone who earns about N1million a month should keep his or her mouth shut when debating about N60,000 for the poor,” he asserted.
“More than 60 years after independence, we are running an apartheid society—not racial apartheid but economic apartheid.”
Fr. Ehusani warned of the potential consequences of such extreme inequality. “There is hardly any society I know that is as divided as the Nigerian society, and a society that is so divided is just sitting on a keg of gunpowder. I have warned before that the revenge of the poor is at the corner. I am not calling for it, but it will happen as night follows day because when you so reduce people to this dehumanising level, nature does not allow a situation of an island of affluence amidst a sea of poverty,” he cautioned.
“Let me warn those in the elite, let me warn those in the tripartite committee of government, that it is in the course of nature that when a predator continues to devour the very resources it needs for its own sustenance, nature will take out the predator in order to achieve a measure of equilibrium. Nature is about balance, and human beings are part of nature,” the cleric added.
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