COLLECTIVE bargaining between the Federal Government and unions, particularly the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has played a significant role in shaping Nigeria’s university system, says Emeritus Prof. Omotoye Olorode in a paper delivered on Thursday, August 20, 2026 at Osun State University, Oṣogbo.
Prof. Olorode, public intellectual and member of the Secretariat Collective of the Movement for Socialist Transformation (MOST), said the impact of nearly five decades of ASUU-Federal Government negotiations could be assessed principally through three areas: university autonomy and academic freedom, funding, and conditions of service for academic staff.
The paper, entitled “Collective Bargaining in Labour Relations – Interrogating the Impact of FGN-Staff Unions Agreements on the Nigerian University System,” traced the roots of ASUU’s engagement with government to the early 1980s, when the union began pressing for regular negotiations over funding, university autonomy and staff welfare.
ASUU formally declared a trade dispute with the Shehu Shagari administration in 1981–82 and subsequently insisted on negotiations, signed agreements and agreed mechanisms for implementation, Olorode revealed in the presentation, and argued that the university crisis must be understood within the broader economic and political changes that followed the collapse of Nigeria’s oil boom and the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies from the 1980s.
He linked those policies to reduced public spending, privatisation and growing pressure on publicly funded education.
Autonomy and Academic Freedom
On university autonomy, Prof. Olorode said collective bargaining had made only limited progress because government control over funding and administration continued to constrain universities. He pointed to bureaucratic control of payroll, staff recruitment, academic programmes and the release of approved funds as factors that, in his view, have weakened institutional autonomy.
He maintained that autonomy and academic freedom should not be interpreted as a licence for universities to operate without accountability. Rather, he said, they are necessary conditions for academics to carry out their intellectual and public responsibilities.
According to him, the continued involvement of government agencies and external consultants in determining courses, curricula and academic programmes has further limited the authority of university senates.
He cited the influence of the National Universities Commission (NUC) and World Bank-linked initiatives as examples of what he described as increasing external control of the university system.
Funding a Major Challenge
On funding, Olorode said ASUU’s position has consistently been that education should be treated as a public good requiring adequate government investment. He identified physical infrastructure, teaching and learning facilities, and personnel as the three major areas requiring sustained funding.
He criticised what he described as inadequate budgetary allocations to education and the poor implementation of agreements reached between the government and university unions; noting that the most recent major agreement, which renegotiated the 2009 agreement, took six years to conclude, from 2017 to 2023, while some of its provisions remained inadequately implemented.
Olorode also highlighted the N250 billion annual revitalisation fund that the Federal Government had agreed to provide to the Nigerian University System over five years, arguing that the commitment had been largely repudiated.
He nevertheless acknowledged that collective bargaining had produced important intervention mechanisms, including the Education Trust Fund, which later became TETFund.
He said such interventions had produced visible infrastructure in universities, although he criticised the way some resources had subsequently been utilised.
Improved Conditions of Service
The paper identified conditions of service as another major area in which collective bargaining had produced measurable gains. These include wages, allowances and other employment benefits.
Olorode said the negotiations had helped improve and standardise conditions of service for university staff, particularly academics, creating benchmarks for remuneration and institutional expectations. He cited the May 1999 agreement with ASUU as a major milestone in improving remuneration.
He also linked collective bargaining to the extension of the retirement age for professors and other lecturers from 65 to 70 years, as well as the introduction of excess workload allowances.
He said the measures were responses to the shortage of academic manpower and the resulting workload pressures on lecturers.
The paper, however, warned that the gains achieved through collective bargaining were being undermined by the expansion of private universities, resistance to unionisation and disagreements over the participation of state universities in collective bargaining arrangements.
Education as a Public Good
In his concluding argument, Prof. Olorode placed the university crisis within what he described as a wider crisis of underdevelopment and the influence of neo-liberal economic policies.
He argued that the structure and direction of education are closely connected to the interests and priorities of the dominant political class.
In this context, he said, university autonomy and academic freedom have become increasingly important as universities seek to preserve their role in knowledge production and the defence of public interests.
He further rejected the argument that government cannot sustainably fund public education, pointing to what he described as the simultaneous proliferation of higher institutions and their inadequate funding.
He suggested that greater investment in existing universities, including improvements in electricity, water and other facilities, could expand access without relying solely on the creation of new institutions.
Olorode, describing collective bargaining as a demonstration of the importance of organised labour’s action in defending public-interest policies in education, concluded that the experience of ASUU and other university staff unions showed that sustained collective action had been central to efforts to preserve public funding, improve staff conditions and defend the broader public purpose of Nigerian universities.
Full paper to be published here by National Record.
