In Nigeria, education has become the longest-running stage play in the country’s history, and every act begins with a familiar announcement: ASUU is on strike. It is a performance so repetitive that even the audience has stopped clapping. As lecturers down tools and students return home yet again, the government mounts its podium to recite old promises, dusted off and renamed “dialogue.” Somewhere between the microphones and the empty classrooms, the real purpose of education is quietly buried.
The tragedy is not that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strikes, but that Nigeria has made striking a culture rather than an exception. Every few years, classrooms are abandoned, calendars are suspended, and futures are placed on pause. Nelson Mandela once said that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” In Nigeria, however, that weapon is perpetually jammed.
The average Nigerian student learns more about strikes than about sociology, more about postponed exams than about economics. A four-year degree is a myth told to freshers during orientation, like a bedtime story whispered by optimists. “We’ll be done in 2027,” they joke, though no one laughs. Each time the strike lingers, ambition turns to anxiety. Dreams lose their shine. Parents grow weary explaining to neighbours that “schools are still on strike.” Even the lecturers, caught in the crossfire of loyalty and survival, begin to look defeated. One cannot teach enlightenment on an empty stomach. Chinua Achebe once observed that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership,” and nowhere is that failure more visible than in the nation’s handling of education.
Government officials blame ASUU for being obstinate. ASUU blames the government for being unreliable. The students blame both sides, but their frustration is swallowed by silence. Each side acts like an innocent spouse in a broken marriage, forgetting that the children: the students, suffer most. Since 2009, the Nigerian government has signed agreements with ASUU as though signing peace treaties with itself. Funds are pledged for revitalisation, salaries promised for harmonisation, and committees inaugurated to “monitor implementation.” Then the silence begins. The government forgets. ASUU reminds. A strike follows. The government pleads. ASUU suspends. The circle begins again.
The absurdity recalls Wole Soyinka’s warning that “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Silence, in this case, is not just political: it is moral. Each broken promise chips away at the faith that education can still mean something in this country. If absurdity were an Olympic sport, Nigeria’s government would have several gold medals for “Committee Formation.” Each time ASUU insists on implementation, the government responds not with solutions but with a fresh committee, as if bureaucracy were a cure for betrayal.
In 2017, the Federal Government inaugurated the Wale Babalakin Committee, celebrated as a “new dawn in university relations.” The dawn lasted four years. Babalakin resigned in 2021 after years of motion without movement. That same year, the government unveiled the Munzali Jibrin Committee, which drafted yet another agreement that was never signed. The report gathered dust, the way all unimplemented wisdom does in Abuja. In 2022 came the Nimi Briggs Renegotiation Committee, which produced a draft that the government also ignored. The document might as well have been titled The 2009 Agreement, Volume III.
By October 2024, the Yayale Ahmed Committee was born, its mission grandly announced as “renegotiating the 2009 agreement with ASUU.” Nigerians yawned; they had seen this movie before. In August 2025, the Minister of Education inaugurated yet another committee, headed by the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, to “look into” the Yayale Ahmed Committee’s draft. In other words, a committee was set up to review another committee’s report. And then, on October 7, 2025, the government crowned the comedy by inaugurating the Tertiary Institutions Expanded Negotiation Committee (FGTIENC), once again headed by Yayale Ahmed. The nation watched with the patience of an exhausted parent. What comes next? Perhaps another committee to “assess the performance of previous committees.” And so the wheel turns, powered by taxpayers and irony.
It is a cruel irony that those who nurture the nation’s brightest minds are treated as beggars at the gate of governance. University lecturers: custodians of intellect and research—are often reduced to living from one unpaid month to the next. They lecture in classrooms without light, supervise theses without internet access, and mark scripts on furniture that belongs in a museum. Meanwhile, politicians send their own children abroad to study “in peace,” then return to lecture Nigerians about patriotism. They cut ribbons at decaying campuses and pose beside walls they never repaired. They forget that “no nation can rise above the quality of its education,” as Chief Obafemi Awolowo once reminded us. Yet they continue to suffocate the very system meant to empower the next generation.
For students, each strike feels like theft. It steals time, faith, and opportunity. A semester that should build knowledge becomes a blank chapter in their lives. By the time the strike is over, many have lost interest, some have lost jobs, and a few have lost hope. Employers now read between the lines of Nigerian degrees. A twenty-five-year-old graduate is not necessarily brilliant; he might just be lucky. A twenty-nine-year-old with a Bachelor’s degree is not lazy; she might have been trapped in the fog of institutional paralysis. The mental toll is rarely discussed. Depression, anxiety, and loss of motivation stalk campuses like silent ghosts. Students grow older waiting for graduation, while their peers abroad move on to postgraduate degrees and careers.
Each time ASUU strikes, the government remembers how to hold a press conference. Spokespersons flood television studios, wagging fingers and repeating the mantra: “Talks are ongoing.” The phrase has become a national lullaby, sung every few years to calm a restless public. When lecturers insist on arrears, the government invokes “no work, no pay,” as though teaching were a side hustle rather than public service. And when salaries are finally paid, it is announced like an act of royal generosity. The concept that education is a right, not a reward, appears to have vanished somewhere in the corridors of power. As the late Dora Akunyili warned, “We cannot continue to live on falsehood and expect progress.”Yet falsehood has become Nigeria’s most renewable resource.
The solutions are not magical. They are simply inconvenient to those in power. Agreements between ASUU and the government must become enforceable legal documents, not political souvenirs. Citizens deserve to see what was promised, when it will be delivered, and who will be accountable when it is not. Funds for education must be transparent, and agencies like TETFund and UBEC should publish detailed, accessible reports on projects, budgets, and outcomes. Every naira meant for laboratories, hostels, and libraries should have a traceable footprint. Universities should be granted real autonomy; if they can manage their own finances and partnerships responsibly, they can innovate, attract private investment, and reduce dependence on unpredictable government goodwill. Nigeria must also embrace digital resilience. If blended or online learning systems had been properly developed, strikes would not paralyse learning entirely. Technology cannot replace the classroom, but it can preserve learning during crises. Above all, education should not be treated as charity but as infrastructure: as vital as roads or electricity. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” Benjamin Franklin once said. Yet in Nigeria, knowledge remains the least funded investment.
Every ASUU strike is a mirror held up to Nigeria’s face, and what we see is uncomfortable: a nation that loves rhetoric more than reform, and negotiation more than implementation. The universities are not failing by accident; they are failing by design, through neglect, apathy, and the slow corrosion of sincerity. If the government cannot keep the lights on in its own classrooms, how can it claim to light the path for the future? If lecturers must beg to be paid, and students must age before they graduate, then what exactly is the nation educating them for? Achebe once warned that “a functioning, robust democracy depends on a healthy, educated, participatory public.” Nigeria’s endless cycle of strikes ensures the opposite: a frustrated, undereducated, and weary public.
For now, the classrooms remain silent, the professors remain angry, and the students remain stranded. Somewhere between the silence and the sarcasm lies the bitter truth: education in Nigeria has become a promise repeated so often that even hope has stopped believing it.
Mohammed El-Nasir Al-Amin, Ph.D
Department of English, Kwara State University, Malete.
[email protected] or [email protected]
