In September 2024, when petrol went from ₦568 to ₦855 a litre, a civil servant who named Modinot told reporters that the fare from Ipaja to Costain via Oshodi had risen from ₦1,000 to ₦1,700. Two years on, with petrol at roughly ₦1,350 a litre at Lagos depots, the Federal Government has agreed to pay public servants ₦70,000 a month towards the cost of getting to work, which works out at ₦1,591 each way over 22 working days, ₦109 less than that single fare cost in 2024.
The agreement was reached this week between the Nigeria Labour Congress and the government at the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, after the union’s two-week ultimatum over petrol prices and the minimum wage expired on 22 October.
The sum will reportedly be paid monthly for six months from November to workers across all levels of the public service, which comes to ₦420,000 per worker. Additionally, a committee will begin renegotiating the national minimum wage, although the two sides still disagree on when any new wage would take effect.
The relief is welcome and the sum is not small. At ₦70,000 it matches the national minimum wage, so for the lowest-paid public servant it doubles monthly income for half a year, yet that wage has not moved since it was signed in July 2024. Within two months of its signing, NNPC raised its pump price from ₦568 to ₦855 a litre. By September, urban pump prices were near ₦1,430, about two and a half times the pre-rise figure.
Lagos set its own minimum wage at ₦85,000 in October 2024, and the Lagos council of the NLC asked for ₦225,000 on Workers’ Day in May. Against that backdrop, a payment that equals the whole national minimum wage but is labelled as transport suggests how much of the journey to work the wage no longer carries.
How the payment is built says something about how that cost is understood, because a flat sum assumes that the journey costs roughly the same for everyone, and the evidence we have suggests that it does not.
One Sum, Many Routes
The aforementioned report from September 2024 shows the variance. The trip from Gate to Cele bus stop rose from ₦200 to ₦300, and the one from Ipaja to Costain via Oshodi rose from ₦1,000 to ₦1,700. Over 22 working days, a return journey on the first costs ₦13,200 a month and on the second ₦74,800, so ₦70,000 covers the shorter route more than five times over and falls ₦4,800 short of the longer one. Those are two-year-old fares on two routes, and current prices will have moved, but the gap between a short hop and a long haul is what a single figure cannot follow.
Tolu, a worker profiled in The Commute Trap, spends ₦500 to ₦700 a day getting from Gowon Estate to Ipaja, which comes to between ₦11,000 and ₦15,400 over 22 working days on a salary of ₦60,000 to ₦100,000, so the same sum would be a windfall on his route and a shortfall on the longest one above.
There is also the question of who is counted. The agreement covers the public service, and the reports we found do not name the drivers, traders and private-sector staff who share the same buses. State and local governments are urged to ‘key into’ the scheme, which leaves it to each of them to decide whether a teacher in Ogun or a clerk in Kano receives anything at all.
What Six Months Cannot Settle
The flat sum has its own logic. It is simple, it can start in November, and verifying every journey would take longer than most workers can wait, so a payment that is easy to administer will reach people sooner than a precise one. Targeting carries costs of its own, and a scheme that matched each payment to a worker’s route would need route-level data that does not yet exist for most Nigerian cities.
The allowance also leaves the price of a litre untouched. The union asked for a reduction, depot prices in Lagos were still around ₦1,350 in mid-October, and none of the reports we found says that demand was met.
Timing is the other limit. Six months from November ends in April 2027, while the 2024 law shortened the minimum wage review cycle from five years to three, which puts the next scheduled review around July 2027. The support would lapse two months before then, with the effective date of any new wage still in dispute.
The same agreement schedules arrears of peculiar allowance, approved from 1 May 2026, to be paid in three instalments from November, and 19 months of unpaid health worker allowances to be cleared from December, a reminder that an allowance is only as useful as the date it arrives.
What would settle the question is a cost that can be read route by route: bus, keke and ride-hailing fares across cities, set against what people earn. TransportFair treats that as a measurement problem, the cost of distance by route, mode and income, so that the next sum is set against evidence and not against the last petrol price. Transport is bought in small notes every morning and every evening, and an allowance that arrives once a month will be measured against that daily bill on the 25th as much as on the 1st.
