Nigeria’s public university sector is once again heading toward industrial crisis, with the Academic Staff Union of Universities warning that its National Executive Council will convene before the end of March to decide whether to call a nationwide strike if the Federal Government has not by then commenced full implementation of the salary agreement signed in January — a deal that was specifically designed to end a sixteen-year cycle of university shutdowns that has cost Nigerian students multiple academic sessions.
ASUU President Professor Chris Piwuna confirmed the threat on Wednesday, telling The Guardian that the budget deadlock in the National Assembly remained the principal obstacle to federal compliance.
“One of the reasons why the challenges keep rearing their heads in different branches is because of the budget. The budget has not been passed,” he said. He acknowledged growing frustration across branches but credited a number of vice-chancellors for what he described as “mopping up funds within the system” to meet their own institutional obligations pending federal disbursement.
The 2025 renegotiated agreement, unveiled at a formal ceremony at the TETFund headquarters in Abuja on January 14, was presented by the Ministry of Education as a decisive resolution to a dispute stretching back to 2009. The breakthrough came under the current administration, which inaugurated the Yayale Ahmed-led renegotiation committee in October 2024, with an agreement reached approximately fourteen months later. The deal’s centrepiece is a 40 percent upward revision of academic staff remuneration in federal tertiary institutions, effective January 1, 2026, delivered through a newly introduced Consolidated Academic Tools Allowance. The allowance was designed to cover journal publications, conference participation, internet access, learned society membership, and book expenses, costs the government acknowledged had been effectively borne by individual academics for years without institutional support. Additional provisions include enhanced pension benefits, a new professorial credit allowance, and restructured Earned Academic Allowances.
At the January 14 ceremony, ASUU expressed guarded optimism. Piwuna said the union was hopeful that the Federal Government “will be different this time,” adding: “It is our belief that our union will not need to issue a strike threat before any part of this agreement is implemented.” That optimism has not survived contact with reality. Two months after the ceremony, full implementation has stalled across most federal universities, with the government attributing the delay to the 2026 appropriations bill not yet having received the National Assembly’s assent.
On March 11, the ASUU chapter at the University of Lagos commenced an indefinite strike after the university management paid what the branch described as “amputated” salaries in both January and February 2026, withholding Earned Academic Allowances at the Akoka campus entirely, and withholding both EAA and Consolidated Academic Tools Allowance payments at the Idi-Araba campus. The chapter said the salary deductions were “a violation of decency” and characterised the university administration’s conduct as “wicked, unfeeling and satanic” in a statement issued before the commencement of the strike action. It said services would remain withdrawn until all withheld salary components for both months were paid in full.
The UNILAG branch action is the most visible manifestation of a wider pattern. Lecturers at the University of Abuja, the University of Calabar, the Federal University of Petroleum Resources in Effurun, the Federal University of Otuoke, the Federal University of Lafia, the Nigerian Maritime University in Okerenkoko, the Federal University of Medical and Health Sciences in Kwale, the Federal University of Technology Minna, and Alvan Ikoku Federal University of Education have all yet to receive the 40 percent increment, according to ASUU branch reports compiled by national secretariat officials. The list covers institutions spread across multiple geopolitical zones, indicating that the implementation gap is not localised to any particular region.
State universities are also caught in the fallout. Several state governments have held back from revising their own salary structures, waiting for the federal tier to move first, a pattern of dependency that has compounded the anxiety of lecturers in state-owned institutions, who had hoped that federal implementation would provide both a funding template and political cover for their own governments to comply.
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The Federal Government’s response to the mounting pressure took an unusual form on Wednesday, when Education Minister Dr Tunji Alausa used the public presentation of 72 TETFund-sponsored academic textbooks in Abuja to redirect scrutiny from the government’s implementation shortfall toward what he described as systemic governance failures within universities themselves. Addressing academic unions in attendance, Alausa said that many vice-chancellors, rectors, and provosts were operating their institutions as personal fiefdoms rather than public trusts.
“The government is really not the problem, but you need to help us as a government, direct those searchlights to the heads of your institutions: the Vice-Chancellors, the Rectors and the Provosts,” he said. “Many of them are running those institutions like an empire. We need your help in ensuring that fiducial responsibilities are met and they are held accountable. Every single money we deploy to those institutions should be used the way they are meant to be used. We would work with you to ensure that is done.”
Alausa’s call on unions to intensify scrutiny of their institutions’ management is not without foundation. ASUU itself, at the January agreement ceremony, identified government encroachment into university autonomy, weak accountability in university management, poor research funding implementation, and declining academic standards as unresolved structural problems that the salary agreement alone cannot fix. The minister’s remarks, however, drew a pointed response from Piwuna, who pledged that the union would intensify its examination of vice-chancellors’ financial decisions, while simultaneously maintaining that the salary implementation failure lay with the government rather than with institutional heads.
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The structural context shaping this dispute is a long one. Between 2009 and 2022, Nigerian students lost more than three full academic sessions to ASUU strikes, some lasting eight to nine months. A full professor in Nigeria currently earns between N500,000 and N700,000 monthly — a figure dwarfed by the South African equivalent of approximately N7.18 million at current exchange rates. Brain drain from Nigerian academia to universities in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States has accelerated in parallel with wage compression, and the renegotiated agreement was explicitly designed to slow that haemorrhage.
The 2009 pact was itself due for renegotiation within three years of its signing, but successive administrations, under Presidents Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, and Bola Tinubu in the early years of his first term, allowed the process to drag on for over a decade, during which time inflation eroded the real value of the 2009 terms to near irrelevance. Renegotiation committees chaired in succession by Wale Babalakin, Munzali Jibrin, and Nimi Briggs all failed to produce a finalisable agreement before the current Yayale Ahmed-led committee eventually reached a conclusion.
The 2026 budget, which contains the appropriations required to fund the 40 percent increment at the federal level, has not been passed by the National Assembly as of Thursday. ASUU’s NEC meeting is scheduled before March 31. If federal compliance has not materialised by that date, the union has indicated it will convene formally to determine its next course of action, with a nationwide strike the most consequential option available to it. No federal official has specified a date by which the budget is expected to receive assent.
