Nigeria’s Working Class Crisis: Poverty-Paid Patriots
By Dr. Shamsu Gujungu | shamsgjg@gmail.com
Institutional Collapse and Loss of Value
Moral values no longer exist, lives are lost, status is downgraded, and the respected groups of society are now reduced to beggars. Nobody considers them important anymore. Nobody wants to be a teacher, doctor, nurse, or lecturer anymore, and nobody wants to join the security forces. Everybody is thinking of how to make money and how to be rich.
When we were growing up, we envied our teachers, looked up to them, emulated them, and wanted to be like them; that is no longer the story today. People no longer care about the country. Unless the living standard of the working class is improved, change may be difficult in this country.
The Realities of a Poverty-Paid Workforce
If people’s earnings can’t satisfy their basic demands of feeding, housing, transport, and schooling for their children, they will constantly be scrambling and looking for alternatives to make ends meet. Regrettably, even though the salary can’t cater to basic needs, in Nigeria today, getting your salary as due is becoming difficult.
The current policies and economic realities have technically effaced the middle class, thereby pushing the country to the reach of only a few and the poor majority, of which the lecturers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and other workers belong.
Legal Contradictions and the Need for Reform
The attention of the working class will constantly be divided in searching for income alternatives to meet their basic needs, including menial jobs, business, and farming. The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria, Fifth Schedule, Part I, Paragraph 2(b), prohibits civil servants from engaging in private business or trade, except for farming—and even that must not interfere with official duties.
Meanwhile, Section 16(2)(d) mandates a national minimum living wage, and Section 17(3)(b) demands just and humane work conditions. Unless the government rethinks and ties earnings to inflation and currency value, inefficiencies, bribery, and corruption will persist across institutions.
Conclusion: Prioritize People, Not Projects
Today, a professor who earned $3,000 in 2012 earns barely $300, despite rising living costs. The solution lies not in empowering EFCC or ICPC, but in improving civil servants’ living standards. These workers manage Nigeria’s most vital institutions. A worker can only care about the country’s future when his basic needs are met.
Nigeria must abandon vanity projects and focus on saving its people. We must have a rethink and improve the living standard of civil servants if we truly seek national transformation.