The Southern Governors’ Forum, the umbrella body for 17 governors from the three geo-political zones of South-West, South-East and South-South have called for the consideration of the cost of living and ability of each state to pay the new minimum wage.
As reported by The Punch, the governors beckoned on the federal government led by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to allow each state to negotiate the new minimum wage with the labour unions.
This was contained in a communique issued at the end of their meeting held on Monday, June 24, in Abeokuta, the Ogun state capital and made available to journalists on Thursday, June 27.
The communique was signed by all the 17 southern governors.
Speaking further, the Southern Governors’ Forum also disclosed it has planned generating 90,000 MW of electricity to cater for the power needs of 90 million residents of the region.
The forum said it is embarking on this project using the rule of thumb of 1,000 MW per 1 million population to arrive at its 90,000MW target, Vanguard reported.
The member states have therefore been encouraged to take advantage of the recent constitutional amendment that now allows states to regulate, generate, transmit and distribute electricity whilst also considering renewable sources of energy to bring the dream to reality.
TheNGblog earlier reported that Rilwan Olanrewaju, a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), said every state government has the potential to pay up to N100,000 as minimum wage.
In an interview with TheNGblog, the PDP chieftain advocated that states should be allowed to pay based on what they get as allocation and their internal revenue.
Olanrewaju lamented that some governors are unwilling to tap into their state’s resources to generate more revenue while advocating for state resource control.
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