Hello, everyone.
I welcome you to my blog. It is no news that inflation is now a worldwide problem, but it just seems to be worse in some parts of the world. Nigeria's inflation is a cause for alarm. Funny how the price of goods and services during the early hours of the day varies with the price of the same goods and services in the evening, more like the price of goods and services increases per hour. Those days it was blamed on the exchange rate, but for some time now the naira to dollar exchange rate has been stable, but the price of goods and services keeps going up and no one is explaining anything or saying anything to the masses. All we do is complain and still go ahead to purchase it because going to try out another shop is a very bad idea as it might be even more expensive there.
designed in canva.
The rate of inflation has made it obvious that the minimum wage we are being paid is just a chicken change and not even enough to cater for personal needs, not to mention taking care of the needs of friends and loved ones. Those who earn the minimum wage these days have nothing to take home after they receive their salary; sometimes the whole money is spent on just transportation fare, sometimes it is spent on just feeding, leaving them with nothing to hold onto. In a country with this rate of inflation, what can one really do with a minimum wage of 30,000 naira ($20.23)? In a country where a bag of rice costs about four times the minimum wage, sometimes I wonder how people who earn the minimum wage manage to cope.
There is nothing that is less expensive now, even garri (cassava flakes) that we used to say is a poor man food, and no matter how inflation affects the price of goods, the price of garri will be left out, but we were very wrong. A custard bucket of garri that was sold for 1,500 ($1.10) is now sold for 4,500 ($3.03) naira. All the money earned can actually be spent on foodstuffs, and you have not talked about other needs, like clothes, and lately it takes the grace of God to have savings, you save for rainy days in the morning and in the evening it is raining, and you are forced to fall back to the little you managed to save earlier on.
There is no way that the minimum wage we are paid is enough; we just engage in certain jobs all because of the saying "half bread is better than nothing." It is better to earn the little you can than not earn at all.
If I had the power to change a thing or two, it's definitely increasing the minimum wage, after which we'd try to curb inflation because if we do not arrest inflation, we will have to keep increasing the minimum wage just so the masses can cope with the little they are being paid.