By Bamidele Atoyebi

Historically, increases in Nigeria’s national minimum wage have often been followed by fiscal pressure, hiring freezes, or actual reductions in public-sector payrolls. From 1999 to 2023, successive administrations struggled to absorb the cost of higher wages without resorting to downsizing or payroll clean-ups that effectively reduced the number of people drawing salaries. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration has so far broken that pattern.

After the minimum wage was raised to ₦5,500 in 2000 under President Olusegun Obasanjo (with a higher ₦7,500 rate applying to many federal workers), the government moved to shrink the workforce. In 2006, then Minister Nasir el-Rufai announced plans to cut approximately 33,000 civil servants, about 20 per cent of the then-estimated 160,000 core public workers, targeting unfit staff, cases of misconduct, and ghost workers inherited from military rule, according to contemporary reports including a BBC account of the reform exercise.

The exercise was explicitly linked to the need to fund both the higher wage bill and broader civil-service reforms. During this period, about 15 states frequently defaulted on salary payments, according to civil society trackers such as BudgIT Nigeria and the Nigeria Labour Congress.

The pattern continued into the next decade. When the national minimum wage rose to ₦18,000 in 2011 under President Goodluck Jonathan, many states fell into arrears and some resorted to local freezes or downsizing. By the end of that administration, 23 states had fallen heavily into salary and pension arrears, driven in part by the global oil crash of 2014 that severely reduced federal allocations. This figure aligns with reports from the Nigeria Labour Congress and civil society trackers.

Transition documents presented to the incoming Buhari government reportedly contained plans for further job cuts that range in thousands because the wage bill had become humongous and difficult to sustain, as later disclosed by presidential spokesman Garba Shehu.

Under President Muhammadu Buhari the minimum wage was increased to ₦30,000 in 2019. Implementation was accompanied by repeated warnings from then Minister of Labour, Chris Ngige that the federal government might have to lay off workers to meet the consequential wage bill, then estimated in the hundreds of billions of naira. By the end of that era, 27 states were officially verified as owing backlog of salaries to primary school teachers and secretariat staff, forcing the federal government to issue multiple multi-billion naira bailout packages. More decisively, the full rollout of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and related biometric verification led to the removal of about 70,000 ghost workers from the federal payroll. By June 2022 the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), under Director-General Dasuki Arabi, officially put the cleaned federal public-service workforce at 720,000.

A federal employment freeze imposed from 2020 further limited new hiring. In short, every major post-1999 minimum-wage increase was followed either by explicit downsizing plans, large-scale payroll sanitisation that reduced headcount, or prolonged hiring freezes, with rising numbers of states unable to pay salaries on time.

*The Tinubu difference*

In July 2024 President Tinubu signed into law a new national minimum wage of ₦70,000, more than a 100 per cent increase from the previous ₦30,000. Consequential adjustments, peculiar allowances and other welfare packages followed. Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele has publicly stated that wage-related spending absorbed a very large share of the additional fiscal resources unlocked by the removal of the fuel subsidy and the floating of the naira.

Despite this sharp rise in the wage bill, the administration has prioritised job retention rather than retrenchment. Targeted new recruitments have continued in critical areas, new ministries and agencies have been created or restructured (including Marine and Blue Economy, Steel Development, Livestock Development, and Art, Culture and the Creative Economy), and no large-scale federal downsizing exercise comparable to previous post-wage-increase episodes has been announced. Before Tinubu took office, the most authoritative official figure for the federal public service on the IPPIS platform stood at approximately 720,000, according to the BPSR’s 2022 disclosure. By 2026, estimates of the public service workforce under the federal government have risen to about 2 million, representing an increase of roughly 178 per cent from the cleaned 720,000 baseline. That cleaned number remains the clearest benchmark of the federal payroll inherited by the current administration, and the sharp expansion under Tinubu underscores the new record in job protection and creation after a major wage increase.

Today, no state is systematically owing standard baseline monthly salaries to central civil servants, a sharp contrast with previous eras, although some states still carry legacy debts, parastatal wage backlogs, and pension or gratuity arrears according to BudgIT’s Subnational Liability Reports.

Previous governments repeatedly faced a painful trade-off: raise wages and then shrink the workforce, or freeze wages and watch purchasing power collapse. Tinubu’s government has so far chosen a third path: fund a substantially higher wage bill through structural reforms while protecting existing jobs and creating limited new ones in priority sectors. Whether this approach can be sustained long-term will depend on revenue performance, the pace of further payroll reforms, and the ability of states (many of which still struggle with the new wage) to follow suit. For now, however, the record is clear: for the first time since the return to democracy in 1999, a major minimum-wage increase has not been accompanied by a corresponding wave of public-service job losses.

That is the new record Tinubu has set.