Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, the governor of Ondo State and head of the Southern Nigeria Governors’ Forum, recently spoke out against the federal government’s practice of capping the wages and benefits of public servants to ensure consistency across the board. With a federal system of government, he claimed, this was undesirable, and the practice of combining state money into monthly distribution of it among the three levels of government was out of date.
This is true despite the fact that several federally recognized states have not yet put the most recent minimum wage law passed in 2019 into effect. The latest N30,000 minimum wage has not yet been paid in six states.
Given this, some economists have argued that state governments ought to have the freedom to choose the wages and benefits of their employees based on the income that is owed to them.
Nevertheless, Yusuf pointed out that only the oil-producing regions of Nigeria now have significant derivation components, emphasizing that other sources of income appear to have been overlooked in terms of derivation.
The standard was set by employees in the federal civil service, according to Dr. Sam Nzekwe, a former president of the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria, even though the wages of federal and state employees were not equal.