The Federal Government will incur additional N315 billion in wage bill in the next six months for the newly introduced allowance for federal workers.
This is as a result of the government’s decision to raise the allowance from N25,000 to N35,000.
The labour leaders rejected Tinubu’s N25,000 provisional wage increment for low-grade workers. As a result, the Federal Government raised the wage award to N35,000.
According to a statement by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mallam Mohammed Idris, “The Federal Government has announced N35,000 only as provisional wage award for all treasury-paid Federal Government workers for six months following further consultation with President Bola Tinubu.”
Earlier in August this year, the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Ben Akabueze, said the Federal Government’s personnel cost was over N5trn, with 1.5 million workers under the Federal Government’s payroll.
He disclosed this to an Ad-Hoc committee of the House of Representatives, seeking to investigate the mismanagement of personnel recruitment, employment racketeering and gross mismanagement of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System.
Akabueze said, “Not only have we not redrawn, we have significantly reduced our numbers and managed the cost of the government, which as of 2015, was about N1trn. Today, it is over N5trn and as much as we desire to depopulate the growing number of unemployed people in the country, the reality is that the government is not really a direct job creator.
“The role of government is to create an enabling environment for the private sector to create jobs. The total number of people in the employment of the federal government nationwide, including all of the security services, the military and all of that, is under 1.5 million people.”
This likely means that 1.5 million federal workers will benefit from the proposed N35,000 monthly palliative proposed by the Federal Government to cushion the effects of the removal of subsidy on the Premium Motor Spirit, popularly known as petrol, for a period of six months.
The Federal Government is expected to spend N52.5bn monthly on 1.5 million federal workers.
This means that a total of N315bn will be spent in six months, with each civil servant getting a total of N210,000.
