Productivity Over Patronage: Reimagining Nigeria’s Wage System for a New Era,-By Oyewole O. Sarumi

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*Photo: Governor Umar Bago of Niger State*

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A recent statement by Niger State Governor, Umar Bago, has struck a dissonant chord in Nigeria’s protracted and often fraught conversation about wages and work. While criticising the excitement over proposed minimum wages of seventy or eighty thousand Naira as inadequate, he unveiled a more radical proposition: the abolition of the monthly salary system in favour of weekly, productivity-driven wages.

To underscore his point, he revealed that on his private farms, he pays graduate assistants the princely sum of five hundred thousand Naira, a figure that dwarfs the earnings of many seasoned civil servants. This declaration is more than a mere anecdote; it is a stark illumination of a fundamental dysfunction at the heart of the Nigerian economy. It highlights the vast chasm between the realities of a potentially productive private sector and the ossified, often unproductive, machinery of the public sector. The governor’s call challenges the very bedrock of Nigeria’s labour culture, forcing a national conversation on whether the current system of monthly remuneration, particularly in government, has become an institutionalised subsidy for idleness, and whether a shift to a productivity-indexed wage model could be the catalyst for the moral economy Nigeria so desperately needs.

Nigeria’s present economic system can be accurately described as an “amoral economy”, a system where the link between effort and reward has been systematically severed, particularly within the public sector. The traditional monthly salary, a legacy of colonial administration, has morphed from a predictable means of sustenance into a tool that perpetuates low productivity and economic stagnation. In this amoral framework, the primary qualification for receiving a government salary is often mere attendance, not output. Vast numbers of civil servants are ensconced in a system where their monthly remuneration is virtually guaranteed, irrespective of whether they have produced a single tangible result, processed a file efficiently, or delivered a service to the public with any measure of diligence.

This phenomenon creates a perverse economic reality. While the private sector, grappling with erratic power supply, multiple taxes, and infrastructural decay, is forced to tether survival to some modicum of efficiency and output, the public sector operates on a different plane. Here, the monthly salary functions as a form of social welfare, divorced from performance metrics. The result is a bloated bureaucracy that consumes a significant portion of the national budget, often at the expense of critical capital expenditure on infrastructure, health, and education, while delivering diminishing returns to the society that funds it. This system is amoral because it rewards inactivity as handsomely as it might reward innovation and hard work, thereby eroding the ethical foundation of work itself. In an era where inflation is eroding purchasing power and the Naira’s value is volatile, the monthly pay has become a symbol of shared poverty and shared mediocrity, rather than a vehicle for shared prosperity.

Governor Bago’s proposition for a weekly wage system is, in theory, a direct assault on this culture of complacency. The logic is compellingly simple: by tying compensation directly to short-term output, you inject an immediate incentive for productivity. A worker who knows their take-home pay at the end of the week is contingent on what they have achieved that week is more likely to be motivated, focused, and accountable. This model, commonplace in agrarian and gig economies, could revolutionise sectors where output is easily measurable. It would force a fundamental re-evaluation of work from a passive activity, enduring time in an office, to an active one, achieving set goals.

From a macroeconomic perspective, a weekly injection of wages into the economy could also stimulate demand at a more granular and consistent level. Instead of large, lump-sum payments at the end of the month that are quickly swallowed by rent and bulk purchases, a weekly flow of smaller amounts could support a more vibrant and continuous cycle of commerce for small businesses, food vendors, and transport operators. This could have a stabilising effect on local economies.

However, the implementation of such a system is fraught with complexity and peril. The most immediate challenge is the quantification of productivity. How does one measure the weekly output of a teacher, a nurse, a policy analyst, or a clerk? Their work often involves intangible outcomes like knowledge transfer, patient care, or effective policy formulation, which do not lend themselves to neat weekly metrics. A poorly designed system could lead to a tyranny of meaningless metrics, where civil servants chase easily quantifiable but ultimately low-value tasks just to hit a weekly target, thereby sacrificing the long-term, strategic thinking that is crucial for governance.

Furthermore, the administrative burden of assessing, verifying, and processing payments for millions of government workers every week would be Herculean. Given the current state of Nigeria’s digital and bureaucratic infrastructure, it could lead to monumental delays, errors, and a new frontier for corruption as workers might be forced to bribe officials to certify their “productivity.” The psychological stress of such an uncertain income stream in an economy with no social safety net could also be devastating for workers, affecting morale and fostering a toxic, hyper-competitive environment.

The reception from organised labour, namely the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), to such a proposal would be predictably and vehemently hostile, and for historically justifiable reasons. The primary mandate of these unions is to protect the job security and welfare of their members. The current monthly salary system, for all its flaws, offers a critical element: stability. It allows workers to plan their lives, secure loans, and meet fixed obligations like rent and school fees with a degree of predictability.

A shift to a productivity-based weekly wage would be perceived as a direct threat to this stability. Labour leaders would argue, not without reason, that in a country with a high cost of living and rampant inflation, workers need the assurance of a fixed income. They would view the proposal as a thinly veiled attempt by the government to abdicate its responsibility as a model employer and to slash its wage bill by finding new ways to underpay workers. The historical context of mistrust between the government and labour is deep. Past promises of reform have often been broken, and initiatives that initially appeared worker-friendly have been used to justify mass retrenchment or wage suppression.
For labour to ever entertain such a radical idea, the precondition would be an iron-clad, transparent, and mutually agreed-upon framework for measuring productivity. The unions would demand a seat at the table, not just as consultants, but as co-architects of the new system. They would insist on robust mechanisms for appeal and dispute resolution to prevent managerial abuse. Furthermore, they would likely demand a guaranteed high floor for the weekly wage. This substantial baseline income ensures survival even in a “low-output” week, effectively proposing a hybrid model rather than a pure performance-based system. The transition would require a level of trust and collaborative dialogue that has been conspicuously absent in government-labour relations for decades.

Governor Bago’s personal example of paying a graduate assistant N500,000 on his farm is a powerful rhetorical device, but its scalability to the national level requires scrutiny. The agricultural model he describes, a concentrated farm estate where inhabitants live and work, is inherently suited for a task-based, productivity-driven wage system. In farming, outputs are tangible: hectares of land cleared, acres weeded, tons of harvest gathered. Productivity is directly observable and measurable on a daily or weekly basis. In this context, paying a graduate N500,000 is not an act of charity; it is a strategic investment predicated on the expectation that the graduate’s knowledge, energy, and output will generate value far exceeding that wage.

This model offers a crucial lesson: high productivity can justify high wages. The problem in the broader Nigerian public sector is that the ecosystem does not support high productivity. The governor’s farm is likely a controlled environment with clear objectives, adequate funding, and (presumably) functional tools. The Nigerian civil service, by contrast, is often an environment of broken-down infrastructure, archaic tools, redundant procedures, and political interference. Asking a civil servant to be highly productive in such an environment is like asking a farmer to till the land without a hoe or seeds.

Therefore, the Bago benchmark cannot be applied in isolation. A monumental investment in the enablers of productivity must precede a national shift to productivity-linked wages. This includes a comprehensive digitalisation of government processes to eliminate bottlenecks, a massive retraining and upskilling of the civil service, a ruthless war on the bureaucratic red tape that stifles initiative, and the provision of the necessary tools, from stable electricity to functional software, for workers actually to perform. Without these foundational reforms, a call for productivity-based pay is tantamount to blaming the workers for the failures of a system they did not design and over which they have little control.

Governor Umar Bago’s call for a weekly, productivity-driven wage system is a necessary and provocative intervention in Nigeria’s economic discourse. It correctly identifies the profound amorality of a system that rewards presence over performance and has contributed significantly to the nation’s developmental stagnation. It forces a conversation that Nigeria can no longer afford to postpone. The current monthly salary structure in the public sector is an anachronism, out of sync with the demands of a modern, competitive economy and the urgent need for efficient service delivery.
However, the journey from identifying the problem to implementing a viable solution is long and complex. A rash, top-down imposition of a weekly wage system without the necessary consensus-building, infrastructural investment, and metric-development would be a recipe for chaos, widespread hardship, and inevitable confrontation with labour. It would likely fail, discrediting the entire concept for a generation.

The prudent path forward is a phased and pragmatic one. The government must first undertake the challenging task of creating an environment conducive to productivity. This means fixing the foundational pillars of the civil service. As a pilot scheme, the productivity model could be introduced in specific, output-driven government agencies, such as revenue generation bodies, certain agricultural extension services, or technical projects, where metrics are more precise. The lessons from these pilot schemes can then be used to design a broader, more nuanced framework.

Ultimately, the goal is to forge a new covenant of work in Nigeria, one where the dignity of labour is restored through a direct and fair link between effort and reward. This transition must be a collaborative endeavour, not a dictum. It requires a partnership between a government that is genuinely committed to reform, a labour movement that is willing to evolve for the long-term health of the nation, and a civil service that is empowered and equipped to succeed. The shift from an amoral economy to a moral one begins with ensuring that a fair day’s work indeed earns a fair day’s pay, and that the systems of the state are designed to encourage and celebrate productivity, not to entrench patronage and mediocrity.

The debate has now been opened; the onus is on the nation to navigate it with wisdom, courage, and an unwavering focus on building a future that works for all.

*Prof. Sarumi is the Chief Strategic Officer, LMS DT Consulting, Faculty, Prowess University, US, and ICLED Business School, and writes from Lagos, Nigeria. He is also a consultant in TVET and indigenous education systems, affiliated with the Global Adaptive Apprenticeship Model (GAAM) research consortium. Tel. 234 803 304 1421, Email: leadershipmgtservice@gmail.com.

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