Colonial Nigeria had no statutory minimum wage. Daily-paid African labourers on the Public Works Department, the Nigerian Railway, the Marine Department and the mines were paid at rates fixed administratively by the Chief Secretary's office, anchored to a 'native rate' first codified by the Hunt Committee of 1934. The Hunt rates — 9d a day in Lagos, 6d in the provinces — were unchanged through the Depression and into the Second World War, even as wartime import inflation eroded real wages by an estimated 60 per cent between 1939 and 1945.
The break came with the 1945 General Strike (21 June – 6 August 1945), led by Michael Imoudu and the Trades Union Congress — the first general strike in West Africa. Governor Sir Arthur Richards conceded a commission of inquiry under W. Tudor Davies, whose report (Cmd. 6939, 1946) granted a 50 per cent COLA backdated to 1942 and is the founding document of organised Nigerian labour bargaining.
A cycle of British colonial wage commissions followed — Harragin (1946) for the senior service, Miller (1947), Foot (1948), Phillipson–Adebo (1948), Gorsuch (1954–55) which produced the first integrated public-service salary structure, and Mbanefo (1959) on the eve of independence. None set a national minimum wage; each tinkered with grade-level rates and COLA bands. The architecture inherited at independence in 1960 was therefore an unequal system of administrative rates for the public service and 'gentleman's agreements' in the private sector — with no statutory floor for the broader workforce. That gap defined the politics of the Morgan Commission and every subsequent wage review.