Beyond Strikes: Reimagining ASUU’s Role in Nigeria’s Higher Education Crisis
John Onyeukwu
Beyond Strikes: Reimagining ASUU’s Role in Nigeria’s Higher Education Crisis
Why moral protest alone can no longer save the Nigerian university system
By John Onyeukwu (Published on the back page of Business a.m. newspaper, Friday, October 24, 2025)
On 13 October 2025, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) declared a two-week national warning strike, once again reigniting long-standing tensions between the Union and the Federal Government. The action followed the expiration of a 14-day ultimatum and arose from persistent grievances: the government’s failure to conclude the renegotiation of the 2009 FGN–ASUU Agreement, non-payment of promotion arrears, withheld three-and-a-half months’ salaries, and the continued non-remittance of third-party deductions such as cooperative dues and pension contributions.
For millions of students, this development feels like a distressing déjà vu, another interruption in an academic journey already strained by lost semesters and delayed graduations. Parents, too, are weary, questioning whether public universities can ever guarantee continuity or value for money. For ASUU, it is a grim reminder that, despite decades of negotiation, petitions, and court interventions, it must still revert to the last resort of industrial action to gain the government’s attention. The strike underscores the deep institutional distrust between both parties, a relationship that has become cyclical and reactive, defined more by confrontation than collaboration. It symbolizes not merely a dispute over wages or funding, but a broader crisis of governance, accountability, and vision in Nigeria’s education sector.
From 2015 to 2025, Nigeria’s public universities have lost the equivalent of nearly two full academic years to strike-induced shutdowns, a staggering cost to a nation already struggling with youth unemployment and declining research output. Each confrontation follows a weary, almost ritualistic script: ASUU issues warnings; the government promises dialogue but rarely delivers; campuses fall silent; parents despair; and students wait in frustration for normalcy to return. When lectures eventually resume, the academic calendar compresses, quality suffers, and morale declines. It is a cycle of crisis and compromise, repeated without resolution.
At the heart of this dysfunction lies the 2009 FGN–ASUU Agreement, a document that once symbolized hope for the revitalization of public universities. It addressed the critical pillars of higher education reform, funding, infrastructure, staff welfare, and autonomy. Yet, sixteen years later, it stands as a monument to unfulfilled promises. The agreement’s provisions have been revisited, reworded, and renegotiated multiple times, but never fully executed. Instead, successive governments have turned implementation into political theatre, using partial compliance to defuse strikes without confronting the systemic decay beneath.
To be fair, ASUU’s persistence has not been entirely fruitless. The union’s pressure has yielded modest victories, ₦25 billion released for revitalization in 2018–2019, partial payment of earned allowances in 2017, pilot testing of UTAS in 2020, and a long-overdue salary review commitment in 2022. These gains, however, are episodic and non-cumulative; they exist in isolation, never forming part of a sustained reform trajectory. Each new administration resets the negotiation table, discarding previous understandings and restarting the dance of demands and denials.
The absence of institutional memory in Nigeria’s governance structure makes matters worse. Ministries change leadership; committees are reconstituted; and the cycle of negotiation begins afresh, with neither side compelled by law or policy to honour the last signed agreement. ASUU’s frustration, therefore, is not only with inadequate funding but with a governance culture that treats continuity as optional. Without a legal or structural mechanism to enforce commitments, every victory is temporary and every strike begins from ground zero; a sobering metaphor for the stagnation of Nigeria’s university system.
In Nigeria’s political culture, public anger rarely translates into meaningful reform. Students and parents, the most immediate victims of disruption, have grown weary of a pattern that leaves their futures suspended and degrees delayed. Over time, their frustration has shifted from government ineptitude to resentment toward lecturers themselves. This misdirected blame has steadily eroded ASUU’s once-commanding moral authority. The government, fully aware of this fatigue, often adopts a strategy of attrition, waiting out the strikes with the confidence that once withheld salaries are restored, the classrooms will inevitably reopen.
If effectiveness is measured by tangible outcomes, improved funding, stronger infrastructure, and genuine competitiveness, then the record is grim. Nigeria’s annual education budget continues to hover between 5 and 7 percent of total expenditure, far below UNESCO’s 15–20 percent benchmark. No Nigerian university ranks among the world’s top 500, while the infrastructure deficit across public universities exceeds ₦1 trillion. Between 2020 and 2024, over 5,000 lecturers have emigrated to foreign institutions, leaving behind depleted faculties, abandoned research projects, and a deepening crisis of mentorship.
The strikes have succeeded in forcing attention but not in delivering transformation. They generate noise but little movement. The government may yield short-term concessions, yet systemic reform remains elusive. ASUU, once a symbol of intellectual resistance, risks becoming a relic of an outdated strategy, mastering visibility, but losing viability in the process.
If ASUU’s struggle has achieved anything, it is to remind Nigerians that advocacy without institutional reform is endurance, not effectiveness. The challenge now is to move from confrontation to collaboration, from strikes to strategy, from reaction to results. The union must recognize that in an evolving global knowledge economy, moral arguments alone no longer suffice; what endures are systems, not sentiments.
First, ASUU must push for a legally enforceable Education Agreement Act that transforms every memorandum of understanding into a binding national commitment. Such a law should stipulate clear timelines, performance indicators, and penalties for government default, ensuring that the gains of one administration do not evaporate under the next.
Second, it must rebuild broad public alliances. The fight for quality education cannot rest solely on the shoulders of lecturers. It requires students, parents, alumni associations, and civil society partners forming a nationwide coalition that reframes university reform as a national development imperative, not a sectoral grievance.
Third, transparency must become ASUU’s new leverage. The union should exemplify the accountability it demands from government by publishing data on how funds are utilized within universities, from revitalization grants to research allocations. Such openness will help restore public trust and moral legitimacy.
Finally, ASUU should institutionalize continuous engagement through a standing ASUU–Federal Government monitoring and evaluation dashboard, publishing quarterly progress updates on commitments. Wage reviews, too, should evolve beyond entitlement debates, linking remuneration to measurable outcomes like research output, mentorship impact, and innovation.
Only through this shift from protest to policy can ASUU move from being a union of resistance to a union of reform, capable of shaping the very governance structures that determine the fate of Nigeria’s higher education.
The tragedy of Nigeria’s university system is not that ASUU strikes too often, but that it must strike at all to be heard. That a community of scholars, the very custodians of a nation’s intellectual capital, must repeatedly down tools to compel the government’s attention is a profound indictment of governance itself. It reflects not only neglect of higher education but also a deeper national crisis: a political culture that responds only to disruption, not dialogue. After decades of confrontation, it is time to admit that the strike weapon, though morally justified and historically necessary, has lost its transformative force. It may pause-decline, but it does not reverse it; it exposes dysfunction, but it cannot rebuild trust.
The next phase must be one of strategic reinvention, where advocacy is fused with innovation, and resistance matures into reform coalitions. ASUU must reimagine itself not as an adversary of the state, but as an indispensable partner in national renewal. The union’s intellectual heritage, its wealth of research, data, and institutional knowledge, should become a policy resource for governance, not a casualty of protest. Nigeria’s universities can serve as incubators of reform ideas, offering blueprints for transparent funding models, merit-based recruitment, and evidence-driven education policies.
ASUU’s greatest leverage no longer lies in the withdrawal of labour but in the application of intellect, transforming scholarship into influence, and collective frustration into strategic foresight. The union can reclaim moral leadership by demonstrating that thought, not threat, is the ultimate engine of change.
Until that happens, campuses may reopen after every strike, but the system itself will remain shut, locked in inertia that no protest can break. Only when ASUU turns its intellectual energy inward, from confrontation to co-creation, will Nigeria’s universities once again become what they were meant to be: the laboratories of a nation’s future, not the battlegrounds of its failure.
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Re - “From 2015 to 2025, Nigeria’s public universities have lost the equivalent of nearly two full academic years to strike-induced shutdowns, a staggering cost to a nation already struggling with youth unemployment and declining research output.”
And of course if the universities were to be churning out graduates at full throttle as ideally they are supposed to be doing, a few million more unemployed and unemployable graduates would only be adding more fuel to the fire, adding more unemployed battalions to the already great armies of the unemployed, the armies of frustrated, unemployable youths. Add to them the Almajiri, and as we all know, just as a hungry man is an angry man, so too a hungry mob is an angry mob and that’s why in a not at all fictional scenario some Nigerian newspaper reporter reporting live from Abuja, or some revolutionary Nigerian novelist, satirist, mythologist, bombastic poet, iconoclast painter like our visionary Blake could well well be painting the scenes in which some self-appointed commander-in-chief, some Nnamdi Kanu-like figure with or without any kind of distinguished or distinguishable ethnic trappings would be leading the army of discontent, the ragtag army of the unemployed in their march to Aso Rock , as some kind of 21st century Najia version of the storming of the bastille, alternately the US 6th of January storming of the Capitol in that bastion of democracy ( crazy demo) looking for, not wacky Nancy Pelosi but looking for the head of educational policy, Bola Ahmed Tinubu , to do him justice, what’s known as “ mob justice” ,no more shuffering and shmiling, but vengeance : Street Justice
Re - ” Nigeria’s annual education budget continues to hover between 5 and 7 percent of total expenditure, far below UNESCO’s 15–20 percent benchmark. No Nigerian university ranks among the world’s top 500, while the infrastructure deficit across public universities exceeds ₦1 trillion. Between 2020 and 2024, over 5,000 lecturers have emigrated to foreign institutions, leaving behind depleted faculties, abandoned research projects, and a deepening crisis of mentorship.”
So it’s definitely a matter of the Government deliberately failing to earmark the required basic 15 - 20% that would move the country from sliding back, standing still at ground Zero, lackadaisical, stagnant, stationed at Zero point inertia
Here’s an eye-opener : The top 10 Universities in Africa
Could John Onyeukwu or some other competent person please explain to us why the structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank usually emphasise taking away education subsidies ?
Since back in the day when AWO's revolutionary educational policy in Western Nigeria was the light illuminating the darkness and that policy became the gold standard and the role model that has demonstrated Education is the sine qua non engine for progress in any country including a developing country’s development, it’s unfathomable that successive governments should be dragging their feet and turning a deaf ear to the pleas of students, parents and university teachers , the intelligentsia ,the possibilities of a golden future .
AWO’s achievement in implementing such a praiseworthy educational policy which is still reaping dividends is the inerasable background for all forward-looking education policy makers in Nigeria, enough reason for all concerned and affected citizens to say
President Tinubu and his “government of national competence” ought to know better...