Chief Jerome Udoji's Public Service Review Commission was inaugurated by General Yakubu Gowon in September 1972 to overhaul the federal public service inherited from the colonial Bridges Commission (1955) and the Morgan Commission (1963). Its remit was managerial (job evaluation, project management, performance appraisal) but its political legacy is the salary review.
The Commission reported in September 1974. It recommended substantial pay increases across all federal grade levels — in some grades over 100% — and, crucially, that the new rates be backdated to 1 April 1974, producing up to nine months of arrears payable in a single lump sum. Gowon, flush with the post-1973 oil-price quadrupling, accepted the report in full on 1 January 1975 and extended it to state public services, parastatals, the universities and (after pressure) to the private sector through a Wages and Salaries Review Decree.
The lump-sum arrears — paid to roughly 600,000 federal and state public servants in the first quarter of 1975 — produced the largest single demand shock in Nigerian post-war history. CBN data show consumer-price inflation at 13.4% in 1974 rising to 33.9% in 1975. Lagos rents doubled within months; the price of imported cars, household goods and building materials surged; the cement market collapsed under the related Cement Armada. The award also re-anchored Nigerian labour expectations: every subsequent commission (Cookey 1981, Dotun Phillips 1988, Allison Ayida 1995, Ekpo 2000, Belgore 2006) is measured against Udoji's generosity. It is the moment at which the federal public service became, definitively, the country's principal consumer class — and the federal salary the principal vector by which the oil rent reached the broader economy. See Oil Boom and the Cement Armada.