The National Minimum Wage Act of 1981 (Act No. 1 of 1981) is the first statute in Nigerian history to fix a single nationally enforceable minimum wage. Signed by President Shehu Shagari on 6 May 1981 after a Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) general-strike threat under President Hassan Sunmonu, it set ₦125 per month (₦1,500/year) as the floor for any employer with 50 or more workers, federal and private alike. State governments, agriculture, domestic service and part-time work were exempted — a political compromise the NLC accepted under duress and has fought to close in every subsequent cycle.
The Act emerged from the Cookey Commission (Presidential Commission on Salaries and Wages, 1980), which had been set up to clean up the inflationary fallout of the Udoji Award and to harmonise public-service grades into the Unified Grading and Salary Structure (UGSS) still in use today. Cookey recommended ₦100/month; the NLC demanded ₦300; the strike threat brokered the ₦125 settlement. The Act also created the National Wages, Incomes and Prices Board and made it a criminal offence for an employer to pay below the statutory floor.
By political design the 1981 wage was meant to be reviewed every three years. It was not. By the time General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew Shagari on 31 December 1983, oil revenues had collapsed, the naira had been devalued and the real value of ₦125 had fallen by more than half. Buhari froze the wage; Babangida froze it again; the floor stayed nominally at ₦125 until the 1990 review. The 1981 Act nonetheless established the legal template — statutory floor, NLC-brokered triennial review, criminal sanction — that every later minimum-wage Act (2000, 2011, 2019, 2024) inherits.