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ASUU has given the federal government until Monday to begin paying a salary structure agreed three months ago, warning that continued non-compliance will trigger fresh industrial action across the country’s public universities and adding to mounting pressure on an administration already confronting labour unrest across multiple sectors of the public service.
ASUU President Professor Christopher Piwuna announced the ultimatum Thursday while delivering a keynote address at a public lecture at Sa’adu Zungur University, Yuli Campus, in Bauchi State. The deadline takes effect immediately and expires on Monday, March 31.
“We have issued a four-day ultimatum from today to the Federal Government to begin the payment of the newly approved salary structure. Failure to comply will attract a strong response from the union,” Piwuna said, without specifying whether that response would include a formal strike notice or other forms of industrial pressure.
The salary agreement, reached in December 2025 after negotiations that stretched across several months and multiple ultimatums, was due to take effect from January 2026. The framework, broadly aligned with recommendations by the Nimi Briggs Committee, included a 40 percent pay adjustment representing the most significant remuneration shift for Nigerian academic staff in more than a decade. Both parties also agreed to peg earned academic allowances at 12 percent of each university’s appropriated academic staff salary and wages, to conduct a three-year review of the agreement, and to sponsor legislation guaranteeing sustainable education funding. Despite those terms, the government has made no disbursement under the new structure.
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ASUU’s National Executive Council accepted the government’s final offer in December after weighing the risk of prolonged stagnation in lecturer earnings against the union’s preference for higher increases. An internal document signed by Piwuna acknowledged that the government had refused to revise its offer and that continued rejection would result in earnings stagnation over a protracted negotiation period. The union’s one-month ultimatum had expired the previous weekend, and the government summoned ASUU leadership to last-minute meetings that stretched from Monday into Tuesday before the agreement was reached.
Thursday’s ultimatum is the latest in a sequence of escalating warnings from ASUU that stretch back through much of 2025. The union issued 14-day and one-month notices in the final months of last year, pressing the government to conclude the renegotiation and implementation of the longstanding 2009 ASUU-Federal Government agreement. In March, ASUU directed members in some branches to withdraw their services over delays in paying June 2025 salary arrears and over complications linked to the transition to the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System, a digital payment platform that has repeatedly disrupted disbursements across public sector agencies.
Piwuna expressed frustration at what he described as the government’s recurring failure to honor agreements, noting that such defaults had driven previous disputes and prolonged strikes that disrupted academic calendars and left millions of students without instruction. The 2022 ASUU strike lasted more than eight months and became one of the longest in the union’s history, affecting every federal university in the country. He said the current delay replicated a pattern his members were no longer prepared to accept.
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Beyond the salary dispute, Piwuna used the Bauchi platform to challenge a separate government initiative: the reported plan to establish a Nigerian campus of Coventry University following President Bola Tinubu’s recent visit to London. He described the proposal as a form of educational colonialism that would erode the standing of domestic institutions, and argued it was commercially questionable given what he said were declining global admission applications at the British university.
“ASUU will resist this move,” he said, urging the government to direct its resources toward improving the standard of Nigerian public universities rather than introducing a parallel foreign institution. He called for deeper collaboration between the government and the union to reform teaching conditions, research infrastructure, and academic governance from within.
The ASUU ultimatum arrives alongside a parallel industrial warning from federal civil servants outside the university sector. The Joint National Public Service Negotiating Council issued a March 31 deadline to the government over delays in implementing a 40 percent peculiar allowance linked to the N70,000 national minimum wage. The council warned in a strongly worded letter to the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission that the patience of its members had been “severely overstretched” and that failure to respond by the deadline would force it to take “necessary action.” The convergence of both ultimatums expiring within days of each other raises the prospect of simultaneous disruptions across multiple arms of the federal workforce.
The Nigeria Labour Congress has previously stated it would intervene if the government continued to default on commitments to academic unions, describing the application of the no-work-no-pay policy during past ASUU strikes as punitive. The federal government, the Ministry of Education, and the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation had not issued formal responses to Thursday’s ultimatum as of the time of this report. Monday’s deadline marks the next critical point in the standoff.
