Chief Executive Officer of a social enterprise platform, Coralworker.com, Lynda Ogbonnaya, has urged the Federal government to show more commitment to the ratification of international Labour laws in order to achieve its target of pulling 100 million Nigerians out of poverty.

Ogbonnaya, stated this yesterday in Abuja when her group presented an award tagged ‘Genuine Humane Employer,’ to the Managing Director of TILT Group, Habeeb Okunola.

Okunola was represented by the managing director of TILT agro-allied, Abbas Amir.

According to Ogbonnaya, most domestic workers in Nigeria receive peanuts as salaries, adding that “what is paid the workers does not commensurate with the rate of inflation”.

She observed that with 130 Million Nigerians living in multi-dimensional poverty, a lot of grassroots and poor individuals are looking for immediate respite from poverty and hunger via jobs that will not require special skills, education, bureaucracy or encumbrances.

She said: “According to International labour organizations, we have laws that have been put in place and we have laws that Nigeria has not ratified yet, which we’re looking for them to do, of course, so that we can lift workers out of poverty. Here in Nigeria, we pay workers the barest minimum but if you go to the market today, inflation keeps rising on a daily basis. But what is paid to workers does not commensurate with the rate of inflation.

“And these people are our drivers, chefs, housekeepers, nannies. We earn so much that we entrust them with our valuable children. Let us look at them like the expensive schools we take our children to. We pay so much to send our children to school, where they are taught and then they come back into the care of a nanny that we’re paying peanut who will be in charge of these children for close to 12 hours daily. So we need to do better in Nigeria.”

Ogbonnaya noted that her organisation enables corporate employers, private individuals, multinationals, expatriates and the general public to hire thoroughly vetted and trained domestic workers across major Nigerian cities.

She noted that the organisation decided to honour Okunola because he has been “supporting and providing resources for free training events, empowerment, sensitization and more to help grassroots workers to gain and sustain their employment, thus keeping a large number of them out of the poverty loop.”