‘President Buhari And I Are Poorly Paid For The Work We Do’ Vice President Yemi Osinbajo Says

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday said that himself and President Buhari are poorly paid when compared to the job they do. According to The Nation, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said this when he spoke at the end-of-year seminar of the State House Press Corps at the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

He said he earns about N1.5m as Vice-President while President Buhari earns about N1.75 million and that the pay is not commensurate with the offices they occupy.

Speaking further, the Vice President berated many media houses for underpaying their staff members. According to him, many media owners make big revenue but simply refuse to pay good wages. He recalled his brief encounters working with media houses as legal adviser and how in all the months he worked he was not paid despite the irregular hours he put in.

”I realised first of all that this (journalism) is not a profession from which one could make a decent living in the first place unless you find a really good way of doing so. But more importantly for me is that you are just on your own. Journalism as a profession is so wide open. There are a few reasons in my view why remuneration is poor. The first is that it is just simply cheating.  There are owners of media that are just cheats. They just want to get something from nothing and that is not uncommon, it is a general malaise, it is not necessarily restricted to the media. It is also the same in the legal profession. There many lawyers if they tell you what they earn, you will certainly not want to be a lawyer. The private sector does not respect the minimum wage. Even if a minimum wage is set nationally, it is not necessarily respected by the private sector and this is something that should be factored in to the status of a company and whether a company is even complying with the requirements.”