Civil servants under the Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council, JNPSNC, Trade Union Side, have written to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu demanding urgent intervention to address the worsening economic hardship facing workers and their dependants.
The workers called on the Federal Government to stabilise the price of Premium Motor Spirit, PMS, at N500 per litre, approve an immediate Wage Award and upwardly review salaries and allowances across the public service.
They also demanded the immediate constitution of a committee to negotiate a new National Minimum Wage ahead of January 2027 and proposed a minimum monthly salary of N500,000 for a Grade Level 01 officer under a new 2027 salary structure.
In a letter addressed to the President at the State House, Abuja, the workers said the recent increase in fuel prices to N1,430 per litre and above in some locations had further worsened the cost-of-living crisis.
They gave the Federal Government until Wednesday, September 30, 2026, to take action on their demands, warning that the prevailing hardship was creating palpable tension among workers and Nigerians.
The JNPSNC said the removal of fuel subsidy three years ago had triggered an astronomical increase in fuel prices and produced multiplier effects on the prices of essential commodities across the economy.
The council said the situation had made life increasingly unbearable for workers, adding that the provision of food palliatives was not a sustainable solution to the economic crisis.
It said: “It has dawned on Nigerian workers that the provision of palliatives such as bags of rice, Indomie, vegetable oil, garri, among other edible foods, is as good as weaponising Nigerians with poverty because it is a Pyrrhic intervention which is unsustainable, inaccessible to the majority of Nigeria’s population and also limited to political cronies.”
The workers argued that a more sustainable intervention would be to reduce the cost of fuel to N500 per litre, saying the measure would have a multiplier effect across the economy by lowering transportation and production costs.
