A senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Prof. Tunde Adeoye, has called for an urgent upward review of the salaries of university lecturers to avert another strike.

Adeoyee made this call on Wednesday in Ota, Ogun State, during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), amid the nationwide protests by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

The don noted that the current pay structure for academic staff was inadequate, pointing out that a professor in a Nigerian university earns about ₦500,000 monthly before deductions and about ₦300,000 after deductions.

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Adeoye stressed that lecturers in some African countries, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, receive better pay than their Nigerian counterparts, and warned that poor welfare conditions could worsen the brain drain in the country’s tertiary institutions.

He called on the Federal Government to renegotiate the 2009 agreement with ASUU and improve lecturers’ conditions of service in order to safeguard the future of Nigeria’s university system

“The ASUU members equally have families and aged parents to cater for. As it is now, many of our members cannot pay their house rents.

“Many of our members who were sick have died, while some with hypertension cannot even afford to buy their routine drugs.

“Most lecturers in our universities lecture on an empty stomach and do the work of four people because of the federal government’s embargo on employment across the institutions.”