The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) reiterated that it has given the Federal Government enough time to meet the demands of its members.
The President of the Union, Christopher Piwuna, said lecturers of public universities had made sacrifices and deserved their entitlements. “We’ve been on this for such a long time, and we have, in our view, always demonstrated patience, understanding, and have adopted dialogue to try to address these issues.
“Since democracy started in 1999 to now, people are quick to say that ASUU has been on strike and schools have been closed, and you wonder what the government thinks about these actions,” Piwuna said yesterday when he appeared as a guest on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief.
He said the union had engaged the administration of President Bola Tinubu, but decried the response of the government, which he said was extremely slow. “When this government came into power two and a half years or so ago, we had engaged them.
This is the second Minister of Education since the advent of this administration; we engaged Prof. Tahir Mamman; we have engaged the current minister, Dr. Tunji Alausa, over these issues.
“And it appears as if the machines of the government work extremely slowly, and we have had that over and over again,” the ASUU president said. “And we say to ourselves: ‘Why can’t you make it more efficient, why can’t you make the government more responsive to these issues?’
“But we think that we have demonstrated enough patience; we’ve kept the schools open. And let me just make this point: the government has tried to keep the schools open,” he added. Members of the union on Tuesday embarked on a nationwide protest to highlight what they described as the Federal Government’s persistent neglect of its long-standing demands.
They had on August 21, 2025, warned of a possible nationwide strike, accusing the government of failing to honour longstanding agreements on the revitalisation and proper funding of Nigeria’s public universities.
The unresolved issues, according to ASUU, include the renegotiation of the 2009 ASUU-FGN agreement, outstanding salary arrears, withheld promotions, and the welfare of retired lecturers.
It said that in spite of the several letters written to the government drawing its attention to the need to resolve the crisis amicably, the government always turned a deaf ear to the lecturers’ pleas.
It also accused the government of consistently pushing the union to embark on a strike action, adding that it was clear that “ASUU may have no other option than to embark on an action to press the FGN to listen” to the demands of its members and do the needful.
