Malam Muhammad Musa Bello, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory FCT, has joined his counterpart of the states to commence the payment of N30,000 new National Minimum Wage to FCT Staff.
Malam Bello has also offset the arrears of the N4 billion minimum wage from April 2019.
The Director, FCT Treasury Department, Ismaila Ishiaku told journalists on Tuesday in Abuja.
Ishiaku said that January salaries will hit the accounts of workers this week. He explained that the gesture of early payment of salaries and arrears was to enable workers to start the year on a financially stable note.
He said: “The minimum wage was to start, effective from April 2019 but its implementation began in December, and because the directive from the federal government came after we in the FCT had already paid the December salary (because we pay very early), we calculated arrears in the second week of January.
We calculated the arrears from April to December. In other words, we have paid for December.
So, we have paid the minimum wage from April to December last year, because the effective date for the new Minimum Wage based on the agreement with labour was April 2019.
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The arrears we cleared was about N4 billion. Now, we have also prepared the January salary with the minimum wage.
So, FCT is on the move. There is no issue of backlog and the payment was not in instalments. We paid everything at once”, he said.
The director assured civil servants in the FCTA of the minister’s commitment to the prompt payment of salaries and other welfare packages due to them.
