President Muhammadu Buhari signed the National Minimum Wage Act 2019 on 18 April 2019, repealing the 1981/2011 Acts and consolidating the statutory floor into a single federal law. It raised the wage from ₦18,000 to ₦30,000/month and shortened the mandatory review cycle from five years to three. The Act emerged from the Bismarck Rewane Tripartite Committee, established in November 2017 after an NLC general-strike threat under Ayuba Wabba, which had initially recommended ₦24,000. The NLC and TUC rejected ₦24,000, called a 24-hour general strike on 27 September 2018, and ultimately extracted ₦30,000.
Implementation negotiations dragged on for eighteen months after assent. The federal Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council and labour finally agreed the 'consequential adjustments' — the cascade of percentage increases up the federal grade structure required to preserve relativities — in October 2019, backdated to April 2019. State-level implementation was uneven: Lagos, Rivers, Kaduna and the FCT paid within twelve months; Zamfara, Kogi and Cross River entered protracted disputes that ran into 2021–2022; several states unilaterally cut allowances to 'fund' the new floor, prompting fresh strikes.
The 2019 Act's structural achievement was procedural: it codified the tripartite (federal–state–labour) negotiation framework and the three-year review cycle, requiring the next review by 2022. That review did not happen on time. The 2023 Tinubu administration's 29 May 2023 fuel-subsidy removal collapsed the real value of the ₦30,000 wage to roughly ₦12,000 in 2019 purchasing power within eight months, forcing the emergency negotiations that produced the 2024 ₦70,000 settlement.