President Olusegun Obasanjo's first major domestic act after his May 1999 inauguration was a minimum-wage settlement. The 1981 Act, last amended in 1993 at ₦363/month, had been overtaken so completely by the Abacha-era naira collapse that federal junior workers were earning under USD 5/month. The NLC, reconstituted under Adams Oshiomhole after the dissolution of the Abacha-era administrators, presented a demand for ₦25,000/month in July 1999 and called the first general strike of the Fourth Republic.
The National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Act 2000 (Act No. 1 of 2000), signed in April 2000, set two rates — ₦5,500/month for federal employees and ₦7,500/month for Lagos and a few high-cost states — and a much-lower ₦3,500/month minimum for state governments that pleaded inability to pay. It was the first time the statute had explicitly written a sub-federal floor into the law itself. The Act retained the 50-employee threshold and the exemption of agriculture, casual labour and part-time work.
The rates were quickly overtaken by the fuel-subsidy and exchange-rate cycles of the Obasanjo years. By 2007 the ₦5,500 federal floor had real value below the 1981 ₦125 wage in dollar terms. But the 2000 Act mattered for two reasons. It was the legislative vehicle that finally moved the statutory floor in real terms after a seven-year freeze, and it established Adams Oshiomhole's NLC as the disciplining counter-power of the early Fourth Republic — a role the Congress played through the 2003–2007 anti-fuel-price strikes and into the politics of the 2011 minimum wage.