Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
1st May, 2026
Let us dispense with the pleasantries.
“Happy Workers’ Day.” Say it slowly. Taste it. Roll it across your tongue like a mouthful of gravel. Because in the Nigeria of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, where a working family’s grocery run has become an exercise in triage, where the nurse earns less in a month than an Abuja senator spends on a single lunch, where the farmer plants in faith and harvests in ruin, those three words constitute perhaps the most spectacular act of institutional dishonesty this republic has ever produced.
And this republic, let us remind ourselves, has produced quite a few.
We gather today, the first day of May 2026, to mark International Workers’ Day. Bunting is unfurled. Speeches are polished. Union leaders, many of them long since captured, co-opted, and domesticated by the very forces they were elected to confront, will mount platforms and deliver thunderous orations about the dignity of labour. And when the microphones are switched off and the crowds disperse, the same Nigerian worker will board a danfo home, pay a fare that has compounded beyond recognition since 2023, return to a rented room lit by a generator he can barely afford to fuel, and eat, if fortune smiles, a meal that costs him a grotesque proportion of a wage that has not kept pace with anything, least of all reality.
This is not hyperbole. This is the ledger.
Since the twin detonations of May 2023, the fuel subsidy removal and the catastrophic managed float of the naira, the Nigerian worker has been subjected to an economic experiment conducted without his consent and suffered without his compensation. The naira, once trading at approximately ₦460 to the dollar, collapsed through ₦1,500 and breached ₦1,800 at its most harrowing. Today, the Central Bank reports the official rate in the vicinity of ₦1,360 to ₦1,380, and the Tinubu administration would very much like you to call this a recovery. Do not be deceived by the arithmetic.
A currency that lost more than two-thirds of its value against the dollar in under two years does not become a success story simply because it has clawed back a fraction of the losses. Every salary negotiated, every savings account held, every retirement fund accumulated before May 2023 was catastrophically devalued in real terms, and no partial rebound restores what was destroyed. The purchasing power of the Nigerian worker was incinerated in the furnace of that devaluation, and the ash does not reassemble itself because the exchange rate chart has tilted slightly upward.
Then there is the matter of inflation, which the Tinubu administration now asks us to measure by a very particular and very convenient ruler. The National Bureau of Statistics, after reporting headline inflation above 30 per cent for much of 2024 and into 2025, quietly rebased its Consumer Price Index in late 2025, adopting a new methodology and a new base year. The headline figure, by the sorcery of statistical revision, has now been reported at 15.38 per cent as of March 2026. The government presents this as evidence of stabilisation. Many independent economists present it as evidence of something rather different: a methodology change arriving at the precise moment the administration most needed better optics, with the new figures bearing only the most strained relationship to what ordinary Nigerians experience at the market gate every morning.
Because here is what the revised CPI does not explain. It does not explain why the transport cost sub-index rose 16.9 per cent year-on-year in March 2026. It does not explain why education costs rose over 22 per cent. It does not explain why miscellaneous goods and services surged 24.5 per cent. What the rebasing has produced is a headline figure that looks reassuring in a press release while the components that govern the actual cost of living for working Nigerians continue to accelerate in ways that no amount of methodological revision can conceal from the family sitting around the dinner table.
The ₦70,000 minimum wage, hailed with fanfare when President Tinubu signed it into law on 29 July 2024, arrived effectively dead. By the time it reached the pockets of the workers it was intended to rescue, the inflationary damage wrought since May 2023 had already consumed its purchasing power down to the bone. Seventy thousand naira. In a country where, even with recent price reductions, a 50kg bag of everyday parboiled rice was still selling at ₦56,000 to ₦63,000 across open markets in Lagos as recently as the Easter period. And the unions had demanded a minimum of ₦250,000. What workers received was less than a third of their own ask, denominated in a currency that had already lost most of its meaning.
The rice price story, in fact, deserves a paragraph of its own, because it perfectly encapsulates the particular genius of this administration for creating crises within crises. Prices have indeed come down from their 2025 peaks. But they have come down because the federal government, under pressure to manufacture an inflation story it could take to the cameras, opened the import taps. The result is that the markets are now flooded with cheaper imported rice, primarily from India and through Benin Republic intermediaries. And what has this achieved? Fewer than 30 per cent of over 500,000 rice farmers in Kebbi State, Nigeria’s foremost rice-producing hub, cultivated rice in the most recent dry season. Over 60 rice mills have shuttered. Local producers who cannot compete with import prices are abandoning their farms ahead of the 2026 wet season planting cycle. The administration has solved the rice price problem by beginning the methodical destruction of Nigeria’s rice farming economy. It has relieved the consumer’s pain in the short term by scheduling the farmer’s ruin for the medium term. This is not economic management. It is economic cannibalism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One imagines he would have found in modern Nigeria a case study that exceeded even his most pessimistic imagination. The Nigerian worker is not merely in chains. He is in chains, underwater, being asked to swim competitively and smile for the cameras.
Consider the teachers. The civil servants. The nurses and orderlies in federal and state hospitals who have not received consistent salaries for months on end in certain states, who purchase their own gloves and sometimes their own syringes, who watch patients die of conditions that would be trivially treatable with adequate supply chains and functioning infrastructure. Consider the factory workers in Apapa and Ilupeju, the market traders of Onitsha and Aba, the artisans of Nnewi, the smallholder farmers of Benue and Ekiti who plant in faith and harvest in heartbreak as input costs, fertiliser, diesel, agrochemicals, have become the exclusive preserve of those with deep pockets and government connections.
Consider, above all, the youth. A generation that was promised that education was the great equaliser, only to discover that a first-class degree from a Nigerian university, itself obtained after years of ASUU strikes, collapsing infrastructure, and lecturers barely better paid than their students, is a currency that buys very little in a labour market haemorrhaging formal employment opportunities. The japa wave, that vast and sorrowful exodus of Nigeria’s brightest and most trained to the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States, is not a phenomenon of ambition alone. It is a vote of no confidence. It is the labour market speaking in the only language left to it when all other forms of address have been ignored.
Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. But there is a particular species of injustice that breeds in the gap between the rhetoric of governance and the reality of the governed. It is the injustice of being told, with a straight face, that the economy is stabilising whilst your transport costs rise at nearly 17 per cent a year and your child’s school fees outpace every salary increment you have ever received. It is the injustice of watching ministers acquire exotic vehicles on security votes whilst workers are told that patience is a virtue and sacrifice is patriotic. It is the injustice, above all, of being wished a happy Workers’ Day by the very administration that has made the working life of the average Nigerian an exercise in bare-knuckle survival.
This is not an argument for despair. Despair, as the philosopher Gramsci might have said, is the luxury of those who cannot see the terrain clearly. This is, rather, a demand for clarity and, beyond clarity, for accountability.
Workers of Nigeria: you are not invisible. Your suffering is not a statistical abstraction that can be revised away by a new base year. It is the lived texture of thirty million daily decisions about what to eat, what to forgo, which child’s school fees to prioritise, which medical appointment to defer. It is a national emergency dressed in the costume of normalcy, and no amount of ceremonial flag-waving on Workers’ Day, no rebased CPI, no selectively quoted exchange rate chart can obscure the scale of what has been done to the Nigerian working class in the name of economic reform.
The time for confetti has passed. The time for comfortable lies is over.
What this day demands, what your labour, your sweat, your irreplaceable contribution to this republic demands, is not a “Happy Workers’ Day.” It demands a just workers’ future. It demands wages indexed to the real cost of living, not the cost of living as computed by a bureau that changes its methodology when the numbers become politically inconvenient. It demands trade and agricultural policies that protect the farmer who feeds the nation rather than sacrificing him on the altar of short-term price optics. It demands an INEC that counts your votes as faithfully as it counts the contributions of those who fund political campaigns. It demands a government that understands that the economy does not exist to reward speculators and insiders, but to create dignified, secure, and remunerative conditions for the men and women who actually build and sustain this country.
Until that day arrives, let us be honest with one another.
This is not a Happy Workers’ Day.
It is a reckoning.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
