Introduction
IT IS GETTING to almost five decades (since 1982) when the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) started persuading the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) to engage in three-yearly negotiations with the union on the critical issues of funding, university autonomy, and conditions of service of academics in the Nigerian University System (NUS).
The late 1970s marked the end of the so-called ‘Oil Boom’ era that generated the delusional position of economic grandeur expressed in the grandiose vision of the Third National Development Plan (1975-1980) and the equally upbeat vision of the National Policy on Education (NPE) of 1976.
In capitalist settings, working class organisations start largely as illegal organisations. Working class organisations, trade unions, had to fight to be allowed to organise and to make demands on wages, conditions of work, decent work, and even civil liberties – to have legal status in dealing with public sector and private sector employers. This is where laws that regulate trade unions and their activities – collective bargaining, wages and minimum wage, strikes and lockouts, pensions and even the right to belong to trade unions, etc. – come in.
Precisely because of the dependence development ideology of Nigeria’s neo-colonial ruling class, the grandiose vision of the Third National Development Plan (NDP) started crumbling by the close of the 1970s. International finance capital took control of Nigeria and bloomed fully into full fascist mode by January 1, 1984. Claude Ake (1978: p. 66; p. 67) noted in general reference to “…the ruling classes of Africa”:
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“…they pursue the task of economic development in the context of an ideological orientation which essentially accepts the developmental precepts of the metropolitan [country] bourgeoisie…
“The ideology of development helps to legitimise dependence. The ideology of development conceptualises development essentially as a process of becoming more like the bourgeois countries…”
Ake also observed that accumulation, private and largely primitive, is the major pre-occupation of the neo-colonial bourgeoisie struggling to become “more and more like the [bourgeoisie of] the bourgeois countries”. They proceed to engage in this accumulation by being agents of foreign capital and through “……giving stimulus [initially] to the development of the state entrepreneurial role” via which they “create wealth, and the state power was their major access to substantial capital, as well as the easiest.” It is the deployment of state power through “entrepreneurial” role of the state that escalate into privatisation of public resources and even social provisioning (education, health, security, and even civil service) especially since the formal inauguration of neoliberalism in the early 1980s.
Capitalism, Wage Labour, Poverty, Inequality and Class Struggle
The development trajectory in neo-colonial countries like Nigeria had been largely via capitalist exploitation of wage labour, export of raw materials and extractive enterprises. However, exploitation of wage labour, compared with western metropolises, had been relatively limited in the industrial sector in neo-colonies especially because of the subaltern economic relations of the peripheries and the metropolises in the global economic equation. The sources of accumulation pertaining to labour exploitation had also been limited especially because of the limited productivity of labour.
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Suffice it to assert that the reward of wage labour in neo-colonies like Nigeria, in both public sector and the private sector, suffer from the imbalance created by relations of political power which also underpins class power and social relations. Class power thus corresponds to power of accumulation which we already said is the major preoccupation of neo-colonial ruling class.
The private sector and the public sector are thus linked by that preoccupation. That link explains the class interests (the interests of accumulation) which the state (manifesting as governments and its apparatuses – bureaucracy, law, educational and cultural institutions, law enforcement, etc) serve. Consequently, even under relative and generalised prosperity and the ruling class gimmicks of social democracy in post-World War II Europe and the Americas and post-Independence Africa (including Nigeria), capitalism generates poverty and inequality; capitalism generates inequality and class struggle.
Class struggles are manifested economically, socially and culturally as conflicts in time and space. Conflicts are resolved via defeat or surrender of one the opposed classes or their coalition, or by accommodation when there is a stalemate. A social revolution occurs when the under-class supplants the hegemonic class and uproots the economic, social and cultural foundations of the hegemony.
In capitalist settings, working class organisations start largely as illegal organisations. Working class organisations, trade unions, had to fight to be allowed to organise and to make demands on wages, conditions of work, decent work, and even civil liberties – to have legal status in dealing with public sector and private sector employers. This is where laws that regulate trade unions and their activities – collective bargaining, wages and minimum wage, strikes and lockouts, pensions and even the right to belong to trade unions, etc. – come in.
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For whatever it is worth, we call the attention of readers to the definition of a trade union according to ChapterT14 of the 1978 Trade Union Act: “[In this Act] – “trade union” means any combination of workers or employers whether temporary or permanent which is to regulate terms and conditions of employment of workers whether the combination would or would not apart from this Act be an unlawful combination, by reason of any of its purposes being in restraint of trade and whether its purposes do or do not include the provision of benefits for its members.”
Three important events of 1978 that conjoined Nigeria’s Trade Union Movement, the academics and The Nigerian Students Movement need to be articulated and emphasized. First, there was the promulgation of the 1978 Trade Unions Decree (now ACT) under which the current Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had been “labouring” since. Secondly, that was the year ASUU was formed as the successor organization to National Association of University Teachers (NAUT). 1978 was also the year The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) was born as the successor of NUNS (National Union of Nigerian Students which was banned by Obasanjo’s military dictatorship.
In the process of the struggles of the underclass, they understand the irreconcilability of the interests of the oppressor and the oppressed and the inevitability of social revolution as the strategic goal of class struggle. These are clearly, issues for further contemplation.
Attack on Public Sector and Trade Unions, and Origins of the Crisis in Nigeria’s Public-funded Education Sector—1978-1988.
The close of the 1970s was, without doubt, a crucial watershed in the trajectory of class struggles, the evolution of the trade union movement, and the response of Nigeria’s working people to what we termed the definitive takeover of Nigeria by imperialist institutions (especially the Bretton Woods institutions) and their indigenous Nigerian subalterns towards the close of the 1970s (Usman, 1978; Olorode, 2025)
The cessation of Nigeria’s Civil War (1967-1970) and the “Oil Boom” that followed which led to demands for general wage increases caused by the Federal Military Government to set up (in 1972) the Udoji Wage Review Commission that increased wages substantially in the public sector including the Nigerian University System. But Udoji awards engendered, inflation, increased inequality and further demands for wage increases!
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The collapse of the post-civil war oil boom prosperity and government (including the university system) commitments occasioned (along with the menace of private accumulation), by the significant expansion of the education (including the university system) sector, arising from the promise of the 1976 National Policy on Education, produced Bretton Woods-inspired cut back on spending in the education and other sectors, and accompanied the development of increased working class consciousness among Nigeria’s traditionally relatively comfortable academics.!
By the time the imperialist siege on the education sector matured under General Olusegun Obasanjo’s “…Watch” and occasioned the “Ali Must Go” NUNS upheaval in 1978, the President of ASUU, Dr. B. A. Ogundimu at that time, already put the crisis of under-funding of Nigerian Universities on the agenda of public discussion!
Three important events of 1978 that conjoined Nigeria’s Trade Union Movement, the academics and The Nigerian Students Movement need to be articulated and emphasized. First, there was the promulgation of the 1978 Trade Unions Decree (now ACT) under which the current Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had been “labouring” since. Secondly, that was the year ASUU was formed as the successor organization to National Association of University Teachers (NAUT). 1978 was also the year The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) was born as the successor of NUNS (National Union of Nigerian Students which was banned by Obasanjo’s military dictatorship.
The foregoing conjunctions saw the NLC, ASUU and NANS working closely through the early 1980s and until the late 1980s when the military dictatorship waged a general war against Nigeria’s labour movement, and specific wars against the NLC, ASUU, and NANS in the process of imposing the IMF/World Bank SAP which, as we already observed, prescribed withdrawal of government support from social services (education and health in particular) and public sector spending generally.
The Political and Economic Foundations of ASUU’s Vision of an Independent and People-oriented Nigeria.
The gains that Nigeria’s working people made since 1960, as we have emphasised, arose from the struggles and sacrifices they made in the struggle for independence. The gains are pivoted on class struggle, pre- and, post-1960 against imperialism and its indigenous collaborators. In a situation in which the promise of independence had become systemically stultified, as we had, especially since the late 1970s, the task of intellectuals (committed intellectuals), in the sense of Paul Baran (1972), had become explicit; the task of intellectual workers from the point of view of ASUU (Ali, 2004):
“ASUU is a Trade Union; But it is a trade union of intellectual workers (Iyayi, 2002: 9). As intellectual in a neo-colonial dependent and underdeveloped nation, it means the intellectual must practice committed scholarship by taking the side of the oppressed (Iyayi, 2002: 10)
“[ASUU Constitution’s objectives]…cannot be achieved without the support of all members and the guidance of what I call basic principles;…university autonomy;…academic freedom;…proper and adequate funding;…democratic, transparent and accountable governance at the university level.
“…ASUU is also committed to the ideal progressive, democratic, egalitarian, transparent and accountable governance with a clear respect for human rights and the rule of law… This is why ASUU struggles also include principled opposition to military dictatorship and principled commitment to the democratic and anti-imperialist struggle…
Three issues dominate ASUU-FGN Negotiations and Agreements since 1982 when ASUU insisted on three-yearly cycles of negotiations. These were the questions of university autonomy, funding of universities, and conditions of service of academics (wages, salaries and general welfare provisions). For reasons that we have anticipated in this presentation and elsewhere, the order in which these issues are presented is not fortuitous. First, university autonomy and academic freedom have to be guaranteed for universities to fulfil their functions as institutions where intellectuals function to defend public purpose in all its ramifications. The issues of appropriate and adequate funding for teaching, learning, municipal facilities, and adequate remuneration of academics flow from the need of university autonomy and academic freedom!
In the foregoing regards, I quote copiously from my July 2, 2026 lecture (Olorode, 2026) under the auspices of Adekunle Ajasin University (Akungba) branch of ASUU:
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“In 1981-1982, ASUU formally declared a Trade Dispute with Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s Federal Government around the issues of University autonomy, funding, and conditions of service. The rest since then, as they say, is now history. ASUU thus declared its identity as a trade union by formally insisting on collective bargaining processes involving negotiations, signed agreement, and modes of implementation. This mode and processes were insisted on, and maintained, in spite of government generalised perfidy.
“…our understanding that the academics, pre-eminently the committed intellectuals among them, epitomise the university system. This characterization of the academics, in my view, has been consolidated in ASUU especially in the last half of a century defined by ‘ASUU Constitution and Code of Practice.’
“In these circumstances in which “IMF/World Bank Recolonization Program” had been ruthlessly implemented by the Nigerian ruling class for half a century, the logic of the current systematic subversion of public-funded and people-oriented education sector, is palpable. Thus, apart from systematic under-funding of the education sector, the frenzied privatisation of education at all levels had been accompanied by a systematic subversion of the foundations of the university system and culture–university autonomy and academic freedom especially. Attacks on these foundations by governments include direct control of payroll, staff recruitment, direct diktats by governments and their bureaucracies (like NUC) on syllabi, course contents and academic programs; careless and reckless establishment of new universities, generalised commercialization of education and careless declarations by ministers about what disciplines are relevant or irrelevant in the universities. The rubbishing of University Senates by World Bank consultants and contractors via programs like CCMAS (Olorode, 2023) should be thoroughly embarrassing to the entire NUS.”
The Impact of FGN-Staff Union Agreements on the Nigerian University System
Every keen observer of the Nigerian University System (NUS) agrees that it is in crisis–deep crisis (Olorode, 2018; 2023; 2026). What we may not agree about, is the details and the nature of the crisis, the causes of the crisis, and the origins of the crisis. We may just add that there is also some agreement that the university system, globally, is also in a crisis that is related to the global economic and political crisis and the ideological ambience and prescribed solutions to the crisis (Freire, 1972; Fleming, 2021) arising from the general crisis of neoliberalism.
Some of these issues had already been anticipated above in this presentation and I intend to return to them somewhat, at the end of this essay. But going forward and according to Olorode (2026), we need to: “Reiterate the World Bank/IMF Foundations of the neoliberal economic and social policies that had been imposed on Nigeria and implemented especially since 1984:
“The said foundations include liberalization of trade, devaluation of national currency (the naira), removal of “subsidies” (on energy, agricultural inputs, social-service provisioning—healthcare delivery, education etc.), generalised deregulation and privatisation, (including of education, security, hospital and health care services) and generalised reduction of the public sector and private sector employment as recommended by the Oronsaye Committee.”
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Let me also insist that, without prejudice to the influence that other unions or interest groups may have exerted on Nigeria’s University System, the dominant and most ramified influence on the trajectory of policy have been that of academic staff which is exercised almost entirely by ASUU.
The matter of collective bargaining in the Nigerian University System, and collective bargaining as a concept of industrial relations and as class action in both the public sector and the private sector in Nigeria, has been a largely ASUU affair since neoliberalism fully debuted under military dictatorship and as imperialism resumed its rampage all over again in 1984 close to half a century ago. We need to emphasize, then, that the only issue that had tied the university staff unions together in Nigeria in collective bargaining agreements is the category of Conditions of Service which is largely about wages, allowances and related emoluments. It is from that point of departure that we must address the goals and impacts of the union of academic staff (ASUU).
Three issues dominate ASUU-FGN Negotiations and Agreements since 1982 when ASUU insisted on three-yearly cycles of negotiations. These were the questions of university autonomy, funding of universities, and conditions of service of academics (wages, salaries and general welfare provisions). For reasons that we have anticipated in this presentation and elsewhere, the order in which these issues are presented is not fortuitous. First, university autonomy and academic freedom have to be guaranteed for universities to fulfil their functions as institutions where intellectuals function to defend public purpose in all its ramifications. The issues of appropriate and adequate funding for teaching, learning, municipal facilities, and adequate remuneration of academics flow from the need of university autonomy and academic freedom!
Regarding any issue, the notion of impact applies in two major ways. One way is impact that maintains existing desirable objectives of a system. The other way is to change methods and means that debilitate a system. We must, again, admit that the nature or way of impact desired in a location, and at a specific time, is a function of economic, political and social contestations and perspectives in society. The direction and intensities in which impacts play out thus depends on balance of political and class forces.
Impacts of ASUU-FGN Agreements on University Autonomy and Academic Freedom.
With the rather constant belief that autonomy means “…universities finding their own funds, if they want to do what they like…”, the question of university autonomy often gets quickly “settled” during negotiations. The same general attitude holds for government side on the question of academic freedom which even many university people misunderstand for “license”!
These all flow from the clearly general belief that “he who pays the piper dictates the tune”!; or, “government owns the universities and can decide what happen or don’t happen…”! All these, which many university people now internalise, simply indicate how superficial ideas of the business of universities have become popularised and ingrained. In 1986, following the uprising in the universities after the murder of ABU (Zaria) students by Nigeria Police Force personnel, Military Government’s Abisoye Panel accused university teachers of “teaching what they were not paid to teach”!
Today, the loss of autonomy and academic freedom had been compounded by financial control and asphyxiation of universities via control of program initiation and expansion, and especially via bureaucratic controls of payroll, irregularity in the release of approved funds, etc. At a more serious level, the National Universities Commission (NUC) and its World Bank affiliated contractors decree establishment of universities of “entrepreneurship”, order courses to be offered, and syllabi to be taught in our universities (Olorode, 2023); they even write books that students will read! Talk of ruling class hubris and their hegemonic cultural control! Add to these the hegemonic cultural control of our universities by imperialist organisations and their ideas. A case we struggled with since the 1970s is the case of World Bank’s agenda setting and, thereby, selective support of aspects of university funding (particularly via loans like NUSIP) and what they now call African Centres of Excellence (ACEs)!
In some universities, TETFund allocation, like those of ETF before it, had been used to build such lavish gates and gate houses you would think the Vice-Chancellors live inside the structures! In many other universities across the country, tens of kilometres of concrete, ornately painted, perimeter fences are constructed. These are universities where students have nowhere to sleep, read or engage in credible sporting activities. We may be tempted to blame all these on the university, and that would not be totally out of place, but the political economy of this incorporates the entire system as a net designed for primitive accumulation.
In the circumstances, many of our university senates simply surrender. On top of all of these, many of the university administrations become victims of the market-forces syndromes of “managerialism” of “market forces” buying-and selling, by referring to themselves as “management”, and thereby subverting the entire conception of “collegial” university system.
The overarching power of ruling class ideology and the political and cultural structures that underpin it had thus limited the impact of collective bargaining and agreements on autonomy and academic freedom on the Nigerian University System.
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The disability thus imposed on Nigeria’s University System and the education sector at large has, we must re-iterate, created the paradox of a disabled system being blamed for not performing; a starved child being blamed for not growing!
Impacts of Collective Bargaining and ASUU–FGN Agreements on Funding of Universities.
ASUU’s viewpoint on adequate funding of universities arises from ASUU’s fundamental belief that the purpose of education is public good, and that its provisioning should be treated as such. Secondly, the mandate also commits the intellectual community to a vision of a teacher’s place of work and learners’ ambience of activity in which teachers and learners can operate and achieve maximum productivity. The conducive ambience of learning and teaching towards that objective, at the minimum, includes adequate teaching and learning facilities and credible municipal and welfare facilities for staff and students. The needs of educational institutions are, therefore, unique.
ASUU has always insisted on appropriate educational environments, particularly on appropriate working, learning and living environments — not luxurious — particularly for students. The enduring proof of the correctness and imperative of this conception of an academic environment is the shame of the constant complaints by our students: lack of water, electricity, clean environment, violence, accidents and sexual violence, especially in private accommodation across our country.
Investments in education are almost entirely for public good even though beneficiaries acquire private or personal benefit. Investments in education, to these extents, are not for-profit. They cannot, therefore, be for only those who can afford it. These basic assumptions are now being fully repudiated and corrupted by frenzied privatisation of the education sector at all levels in Nigeria, a genuinely far cry from the national developmental agenda of the struggle for independence and,even, the Third National Development Plan!
Today, the ruling class’ continued cynicism about the issue of funding is explicit in the ridiculously low levels of Federal budgetary allocations to education of around 6% to 7%. Backed up with massive government resort to propaganda and subterfuge, every aspect of the ASUU–FGN Agreements (the last one took six full years—2017 to 2023—to conclude) became an example of bad faith on government’s part, not to mention the humiliation and victimisation of the no-work-no-pay policy when strikes become the only way to persuade an irresponsible ruling class that they do not own the country!
On each occasion that strikes were forced on ASUU by government consistently display unseriousness. As of today, aspects of the agreement of 2023 which, as we said, has to do with the re-negotiation of the 2009 Agreement, remains being implemented largely in their breach! And on the general issue of actually negotiated agreement on funding, perhaps the most scandalous example is the virtual repudiation of the yearly N250 billion Revitalisation Fund which the Federal Government agreed to give to the Nigerian University System over five years, following their scandalous conditions reported by government’s own Needs Assessment Committee in 2013.
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As we noted, funding in the university system has to do with three major areas. First, there is the issue of erection, maintenance and expansion of physical academic, teaching and other facilities (buildings and appertaining infrastructures, roads, grounds, etc.).
Secondly, there are the core academic facilities, i.e. teaching and learning facilities (workshops, libraries, laboratories, equipment, etc.).
Thirdly, there is the major area of personnel–academic, support (admin, secretarial, security, maintenance, etc.), health services, etc.
There is, needless to say, complete breakdown in how these needs are determined and the processes for remedying them. A whole lot of these is now being corrupted through what is now referred to as envelope system of funding and through outsourcing. Recruitment of personnel is not only out of the hands of universities but totally corrupted by outsourcing which also corrupts the universities and open them to massive blackmail.
In spite of ASUU’s unrelenting agitation for increased and consistent budgetary allocation to education, we must admit that ASUU’s impact, the impact of ASUU-FGN Agreements, had been completely negative. It is also noteworthy that in virtually all negotiation rounds since 1992, Government teams and ASUU had entered disagreement on imposition of school fees which have continued to increase in one guise or another. Of course, there had also been government insistence on IGR-based strategy of university funding, which had also enabled massive corruption in the university system; so massive that government used the excuse to impose, in federal universities, the so-called TSA policy which itself had ended nowhere!
In recent times, the issue of sustainability of an expanding, or expansive, people-centred public-funded education sector, is being raised in a rather eclectic way, and to justify various policies and policy options including those that may be subversive of the liberation of oppressed classes and exploited countries and territories. Basically, a system, policy, or line of action is sustainable if its goals and vision can be maintained at an acceptable level of quality and effectiveness into the foreseeable future. What is often missing in this conception of sustainability are the quality of knowledge and the conception of duty that underpin the project or policy. Both of these are crucial for adaptive tactical and strategic responses along the road of execution of any general policy, project or action.
In the area of special intervention funds in which Government–Staff Unions’ Agreements recorded remarkable impact in certain areas (ETF, TETFUND, etc.), the evidence provided by the facades (buildings, campus perimeter fences, multiplicity of official expensive utility and other vehicles, legendarily opulent university campus gates) tell impressive stories of impact. However, these stories need renditions that do not suppress information on the tendentious and irresponsible disposal of resources that ASUU fought for with sweat and blood, but which internal university forces and external government political and bureaucratic forces simply squander.
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Before we proceed further, let us remind Nigerians that the original ideas about intervention funds outside budgetary allocation were the brain child of ASUU! ASUU’s proposals, apart from Education Trust Fund (ETF) which later transformed into TETFund, included the establishment of Nigerian Universities Property Company to which the FGN would hand over certain public landed property in Lagos when the seat of government moves to Abuja. ASUU’s proposals also included the dedication of a certain percentage of Nigeria’s sovereign oil wealth to the Nigerian University System. We all know, as there are public and print-media reports, how successive Nigeria’s ruling class governments shared FGN landed property in Lagos and other places, and the “oil blocks”, among themselves, their friends, and business partners!
In some universities, TETFund allocation, like those of ETF before it, had been used to build such lavish gates and gate houses you would think the Vice-Chancellors live inside the structures! In many other universities across the country, tens of kilometres of concrete, ornately painted, perimeter fences are constructed. These are universities where students have nowhere to sleep, read or engage in credible sporting activities. We may be tempted to blame all these on the university, and that would not be totally out of place, but the political economy of this incorporates the entire system as a net designed for primitive accumulation.
The foregoing explanation applies to various other propagandised government intervention programmes such as NELFUND (National Educational Loan Fund), TISSF (Tertiary Institutions Staff Support Fund) which government deploys to subvert ASUU’s cohesion (TISSF) or to subvert authentic funding proposals by ASUU and other workers’ unions. TISSF, which now promises to advance loans to university lecturers, replaces just and appropriate remuneration, salaries, and emoluments with debt traps while NELFUND is instituted not only to shift the burden of education on the recipients but to empower private, for-profit private educational institutions and thus further entrench privatisation of education.
The long and short of all these, and notwithstanding the internal and external abuses of the resources alleged to alleviate the crises of funding in the universities, is that ASUU’s collective bargaining principles brought tremendous strength to the Nigerian University System. ASUU Agreements have had massive impact on the public-funded universities in Nigeria in the key area of funding.
Impact of Collective Bargaining and ASUU-FGN Agreements on Conditions of Service.
The foregoing leads us to the third important issue of Staff–Union/Government Collective Bargaining negotiations in the Nigerian University System—Conditions of Service.
These have to do with wages, salaries, and other emoluments, allowances, etc., etc.
I will restrict myself to the question of the conditions of service of academics to save time and space and enable answers to certain fundamental questions about the character of academic jobs and related jobs such as doctors, nurses, etc.
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We may start by being categorical that when standards are uniform for assessing a category of workers from employer to employer, from country to country, employees are highly mobile. To this extent, and at the limit of this generalisation, we can assert categorically that all lecturers are mobile because the standards for determining their qualifications and ranks are, indeed, international. To attract the best of them, or at least those that have capacity, the standard of remuneration needs not be entirely equal to other places, but it needs to be sufficiently attractive to be able to retain its personnel. The consequence of treating this axiom lightly is what is called the brain drain that had been occurring massively in Nigeria especially since the 1980s and 1990s whereby a huge lot of Nigerian talents ended up abroad.
The first major leap forward in regard to remuneration was the achievement of the agreement of May 1999 signed with ASUU, by the then Minister of Education, Olaiya Oni, at the end of military rule. A major impact of collective bargaining between staff unions and government in the Nigerian University System is that there has been the improvement and standardization of conditions of service of university staff, especially the academics. This salutary consequence is what neoliberal policies of generalized underdevelopment had subverted in Nigeria. This improvement and standardization generated a benchmark of quality and credibility of academic and institutional expectations.
We need also to make the point that the general shortage of academic manpower especially since the early 2000s created a situation in which academic staff have been, and continue to be, generally overworked. ASUU proposed, and an agreement was reached with FGN, that a way around shortage of lecturers was to raise retiring age of professors and other categories of lecturers from 65 years to seventy years. This was not a favour to retiring academics; it was a call to duty! Similarly, it was general shortage of academic staff and the heavier work load on lecturers that led to the negotiated Excess Work Load Allowance.
The major impact of collective bargaining between government and staff unions, pre-eminently ASUU, on the Nigerian University System, is the demonstration, over time, that class action is necessary for insisting on, and sustaining, public policy options that prioritise public good in the education sector. We have demonstrated that the impact had been animated substantially by committed intellectuals, necessarily, via working class action that reflects the aspiration of the people of Nigeria.
It is this gain from collective bargaining that privatization of Nigeria’s education sector and the hostility of private universities to unionization of workers consistently vitiate today. It is also this gain that the incomprehensibly limited vision of many state governments fail to internalise when they raise objections to state universities joining ASUU as an indivisible entity in collective bargaining engagement: objections they raise, that are clearly myopic and self-servicing alleging justification of concurrent or exclusive provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
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Needless to re-iterate, one of the overall gains made by all categories of university workers regarding emoluments and general conditions of service were the pioneering vision of the role of the working class in societies confronting imperialism and neo-colonial economic and cultural control. It is not fortuitous that a trade union of intellectuals, ASUU, has been the one that assumed the mantle. These footprints of ASUU have been visible in the Nigerian trade union movement since the late 1970s and especially since ASUU joined, and became an affiliate of, the Nigeria Labour Congress in 1982.
Conclusions: Intellectual Culture, Working Class Consciousness, and Education for National Liberation.
I wish to conclude this presentation by returning to the foundational issues concerning the political economy of class and class struggles which must underpin all serious discussions around labour unions, collective bargaining and their relations to strategic visions of national development especially in the peripheries of global capitalism today. This had been our approach, virtually axiomatic and dialectical, to understanding the specificity of the deepening crisis of the Nigerian University System.We must emphasise, too, that the general crisis of underdevelopment is what underpins the crisis in the education sector.
The structure and the content of the education sector (the culture sector) in any country or society is determined largely by the vision and interests of the dominant political class. Both are maintained or manipulated in accordance with that vision and the attendant interests: that explains the nature, and changes and “non-changes” in the education sector of Nigeria from colonial days till today.
When the vision or/and interests of the ruling class begin to be antagonistic to those of the people and inimical to the advancement of knowledge and pursuit of the truth, the first challenges often comes from the (committed) intellectuals who we have said are often most concentrated in the universities. This is the situation of the neo-liberal crisis which the Nigerian ruling class and imperialism had imposed in our country in the last fifty years.
We, thus, hardly need to be delayed in this presentation about the paramount requirements of university autonomy and academic freedom. It should be obvious why both requirements have been under siege since imperialism and its Nigerian agents’ assaults on both university autonomy and academic freedom became starker and more deadly as the ruling class needed more and more to impose anti-people policies, and the university system had more and more to defend national and popular interests. In 1986, a government panel (the Emmanuel Abisoye Panel of Enquiry into the ABU police shootings) accused university teachers of “teaching what they are not paid to teach”. Today, forty years later, Nigeria’s Minister of Education is reportedly issuing diktats on what will be taught or not in the Nigerian Universities, the NUC is imposing syllabi on university senates and the Minister is declaring certain academic disciplines “irrelevant”!
We must put all of these in the context of the global neo-liberal capitalist project of either controlling or asphyxiating global educational and cultural industry, the project which is killing knowledge industry both in the metropolises and the peripheries of capitalism. Giroux (2021) observed: “In the last 50 years, neo-liberalism had waged a major assault on higher education. The seriousness of this assault and its impact on modes of governance, faculty and students is a narrative of major importance that needs to be identified, analyzed, and addressed in all of its complexities if higher education is to be reclaimed as a crucial public good.”
For the peripheries of the neo-liberal siege on higher education specifically, Federici, Caffentzis and Alidou (2001) already anticipated Giroux (Ibid.) twenty years earlier: “It is also true, prior to structural adjustment the African System was becoming more democratic with students and teachers less and less coming from the ranks of African elites and more and more bringing to the campuses the aspirations of the African peoples.”
The demands for university autonomy and academic freedom are not, and must not be, construed as demand for license and elitism. They are demands that enable intellectuals to deliver on their mandate, their responsibility, in a society where overlapping generations of the ruling class are profiting from escalating economic, social and cultural crisis. In these circumstances, the ruling class becomes more and more “reactionary”. And as Baran (1969) put it:
“The more reactionary a ruling class, the more obvious it becomes that the social order over which it presides has turned into an impediment to human liberation, the more its ideology is taken over by anti-intellectualism, irrationalism and superstition.”
In recent times, the issue of sustainability of an expanding, or expansive, people-centred public-funded education sector, is being raised in a rather eclectic way, and to justify various policies and policy options including those that may be subversive of the liberation of oppressed classes and exploited countries and territories. Basically, a system, policy, or line of action is sustainable if its goals and vision can be maintained at an acceptable level of quality and effectiveness into the foreseeable future. What is often missing in this conception of sustainability are the quality of knowledge and the conception of duty that underpin the project or policy. Both of these are crucial for adaptive tactical and strategic responses along the road of execution of any general policy, project or action.
The conception of sustainability must, of course, be internally coherent. For decades now, Nigerians had been regaled with IMF/World Bank and government(s)—federal and states—insistence that government “alone” cannot fund education. Yet, we have witnessed unprecedented, and scandalous proliferation of higher educational institutions that are equally scandalously underfunded and without significant improvement in access. In these circumstances, available alternatives like the proposals for expansion and upgrade of existing facilities (water and electricity supply, municipal facilities for students and staff, etc.) in existing higher institutions have been consistently ignored! Such proposals that entail rather limited increases in expenditure would enable up to triple intake of students, according to Professor Chukwuka Okonjo (late Trustee of ASUU), had been in practice around the world for decades!
I seek your indulgence to call your kind attention to a number of observations referenced in some of my recent public lectures on the question of education, power, and the politics of liberation—the ultimate goal of all processes of “becoming aware”, of becoming educated for “public good” purposes.
I start with Norton (1978) who observed:
“Let us recall that the culture industry (education) is notorious not only for repressing current information, but for exacerbating “social amnesia”, the collective forgetfulness of the struggles of the past.
“It is not just that teaching [what we teach or are asked to teach] is political, in its missions, in interpretations that attach to the very concepts used….”
I also seek your indulgence to use a rather long quote from my lecture (Olorode, 2023) sponsored by ASUU (Olabisi Onabanjo University ASUU) at the Ago-Iwoye, Shagamu and Ayetoro campuses in 2023:
“Education, the culture industry, seeks, in colonial and its neo-colonial sequel, to subvert cultural freedom and liberation especially for the masses of the people. This is why the education sector especially the tertiary segment had become a major locus of class and anti-imperialist struggle up till this 21st century. The role of the neo-colonial state, its bureaucracies including the National Universities Commission (NUC), their consultancies (like the one supervising CCMAS) and the Accountant General (of the Federation) that imposes the IPPIS; the Ministry of Labour that imposes no-work-no-pay towards liquidating trade unions, is to implement the ideology of capital by imposing curricula and privatisation of the entire sector!
“The attacks on, and blackmail of, the Nigerian University System, on scholarship and scholars, epitomised by IGR-ism, IPPIS, insistence of Government Negotiating Team at the ASUU-FGN negotiations on what they call (Key Performance Indices–KPI), managerialism–university “management” versus university “workers”, as different from collegial university system, imposition of courses and syllabi on University Senates, by NUC contractors, IMF/World Bank and multinational “educational” consultancies (again, see Olorode, 2023a on NUC’s CCMAS) are not just flukes at the periphery of neo-liberal capitalism like Nigeria, Entrepreneurship courses have been imposed on Nigerian universities and the students. At the University of Abuja, according to reports, the authorities have made registration of a private company with the Corporate Affairs Commission a requirement for graduation!”
And finally, let me cap this presentation with Paulo Freire’s (1972: p. 25; p. 68: emphasis mine) categorical assertion: “Liberation is [thus] a child birth and a painful one. The man who emerges is a new man, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all men….
“The starting point of organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspiration of the people.”
Our conclusion must thus be also categorical that under neo-liberal economic, social, and cultural policies and their required negation, EDUCATION IS CLASS ACTION AND POLITICAL ACTION! Our understanding of the meaning of “political action” here, and today, is “day-to-day independent class action of the victims of neo-liberal accumulation, exploitation, and oppression; hence the equation of education on one hand, and political action on the other.
The major impact of collective bargaining between government and staff unions, pre-eminently ASUU, on the Nigerian University System, is the demonstration, over time, that class action is necessary for insisting on, and sustaining, public policy options that prioritise public good in the education sector. We have demonstrated that the impact had been animated substantially by committed intellectuals, necessarily, via working class action that reflects the aspiration of the people of Nigeria.
Being a paper presented at Osun State University, Oṣogbo on Thursday, August 20, 2026, by Emeritus Professor Olorode, Member, Secretariat Collective, Movement for Socialist Transformation (MOST-Nigeria). Prof Olorode can be reached via e-mail: omotoopo@gmail.com
