Farooq Kperogi: Celebrating ASUU-FG’s historic reset with caveats

After sixteen years of stalemate, serial strikes and ritualized brinkmanship, the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have finally signed a renegotiated agreement that replaces the moribund 2009 pact. This is at once historic, consequential and praiseworthy.

For the first time in a generation, Nigeria’s public universities have a framework that promises industrial harmony, predictability of academic calendars and an end to the cruel cycle in which students lose years of their lives to shutdowns that have nothing to do with them. If implemented faithfully, the agreement will allow students to graduate on time, restore confidence in public universities and begin the long task of rebuilding Nigeria’s battered higher education system.

Credit is due to the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, and to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for pushing this through. In fact, the ASUU agreement is about the only major promise Tinubu made in the poetry of campaign that he has clearly kept in the prose of governance.

The symbolism is even more striking when contrasted with the immediate past. The Muhammadu Buhari administration presided over one of the most destructive eras in the history of Nigerian university education.

This was made all the more tragic by the presence of Adamu Adamu as Minister of Education. Before his appointment, Adamu, for whom I had enormously unconditional respect, was a well-known public defender of ASUU in his intrepid newspaper columns in the Daily Trust. Once in office, however, he turned out to be one of the most hostile ministers Nigerian academics have ever encountered.

On October 9, 2022, at the height of that administration’s war with ASUU, I wrote on social media: “Adamu Adamu, an erstwhile ASUU ally, is turning out to be the deadliest foe ASUU has ever had. With help from Ngige, he’s dealing the union one crushing blow after another…. Lesson: the fact that someone is your friend today doesn’t mean they can’t be a murderous foe tomorrow.”

The Tinubu administration has, at the very least, reversed that posture of antagonism and replaced it with negotiation, compromise and a willingness to reset the relationship between government and academia.

At its core, the new pact addresses the three issues that have driven nearly two decades of conflict: pay, welfare and the structure of university funding.

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First is a 40 percent salary increase for lecturers, effective January 1, 2026. Someone rightly remarked that it’s the single largest upward review of academic salaries in over a decade. It’s a long overdue correction after years of erosion by inflation and currency collapse.

For professors, this comes with a new professorial cadre allowance of about 140,000 naira monthly, while readers (roughly equivalent to associate professors) receive about 70,000 naira. Earned academic allowances have also been restructured and tied more clearly to actual academic labor such as postgraduate supervision, fieldwork and research coordination.

Second is a major reform of retirement benefits. Professors who retire at the statutory age of 70 are now guaranteed pension benefits equivalent to their full annual salary. This provision alone is transformative. It ends the shameful tradition of professors retiring into poverty after decades of service and sends a powerful signal to younger academics that a life devoted to teaching and research will not be punished at the end.

Third is the institutionalization of research funding through the proposed establishment of a National Research Council, funded at not less than one percent of GDP. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, research financing is being embedded in national planning rather than left to donor whims and sporadic government interventions.

If implemented properly, this could anchor doctoral training, strengthen laboratories and libraries and finally position Nigeria as a serious knowledge producer.

Fourth is a new funding structure for universities that links capital funding, infrastructure development and staff development to long-term planning rather than emergency interventions. TETFund remains central, but funding is now part of an overarching reform framework.

Fifth is a recommitment to university autonomy and academic freedom, including protections against political interference in hiring, curriculum and internal governance. If faithfully implemented, which is never a guarantee but noteworthy nonetheless, vice-chancellors may not be the glorified political appointees that many of them are now, and universities may cease to be extensions of the civil service.

Finally, the agreement formally buries the 2009 pact that haunted the system like a zombie document. The new framework, produced by the Yayale Ahmed Committee after fourteen months of negotiations, is structured, phased and subject to periodic review. This gives ASUU leverage and gives government predictability.

Yet it is important to separate celebration from illusion. The new agreement is a noteworthy improvement on the living and working conditions of Nigerian university lecturers. But it is not yet competitive by continental standards, and it is unlikely, on its own, to halt academic brain drain.

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Before the agreement, a full professor in a federal university earned roughly 525,000 naira to 630,000 naira monthly. With a 40 percent raise and the new 140,000-naira professorial allowance, a senior professor will now earn in the range of 1 million naira to 1.1 million naira per month, depending on rank and allowances.

That sounds impressive in naira terms. In continental terms, however, it remains deeply uncompetitive.

In South Africa, professors earn the equivalent of about $4,500 to $5,000 per month. In Kenya, professors earn around $1,300 monthly. In Uganda, the figure is about $1,100. In Ghana, professors earn roughly $700 to $800 monthly. In Egypt and Morocco, senior academics earn well above Nigeria’s new scale.

At current exchange rates, a Nigerian professor earning 1.1 million naira a month makes roughly $700. That places Nigeria near the bottom of Africa’s academic pay ladder, ahead of only a handful of fragile economies.

This is why Nigerian universities continue to hemorrhage talent. Professors are leaving for South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana, the Gulf, Europe and North America not because they dislike Nigeria but because Nigeria does not value academic labor competitively. A Nigerian professor now earns in a month what a South African professor earns in a week.

The salary increase is therefore a necessary correction, not a strategic solution. It slows the bleeding. It does not stop it.

There is also a potential booby trap embedded in the agreement that deserves sober reflection. The guarantee of full-salary pensions for retired professors has been widely welcomed, and rightly so. But pension experts have warned that this provision resembles a return to the old defined-benefit pension system that Nigeria abandoned two decades ago because it was fiscally unsustainable.

A January 16, 2026, report by TheCable highlighted the controversy sparked by the Director-General of the National Pension Commission, who defended the ASUU deal amid fears that it could undermine the contributory pension scheme. Critics argue that guaranteeing pensions equivalent to full salaries without a clearly defined funding mechanism risks recreating the very problems that forced Nigeria to reform its pension system in the first place.

If the new pension promise is not carefully structured, transparently funded and legally insulated from political manipulation, it could become a future flashpoint for industrial conflict that unfairly punishes students and parents.

Expectations will rise. Budgetary pressures will mount. Regulators will resist. And another round of industrial disharmony could follow.

There is one more omission in the agreement that deserves attention. My friend Prof. Moses Ochonu and I have long argued that the federal government should not simply accede to ASUU’s demands, however legitimate, without also insisting on mechanisms for instructional accountability, research productivity, service delivery and innovation.

Without a system to institutionalize accountability and transparency, students will always be shortchanged, and the nation will be betrayed by lecturers who show little commitment to their craft or to genuine knowledge production and dissemination.

It has become a disturbing culture in Nigerian universities for lecturers to show up in class whenever they please without consequence. In my undergraduate days, I took courses where lecturers appeared only twice in the entire semester, first to introduce themselves and last to set an exam on material they never taught. My conversations with today’s undergraduates suggest that this still happens.

Of course, not everyone is guilty of this. Many Nigerian academics are dedicated teachers and serious scholars working under brutal conditions. But not even one person should be allowed to get away with such negligence.

University lecturers should also not be allowed to publish in substandard, pay-to-play, predatory journals simply to climb the academic ladder. Promotion should reward intellectual rigor, not transactional publishing.
If Nigeria is going to invest billions in salaries, pensions, and research funding, it must also demand excellence in return. Anything less is a betrayal of students and of the country’s development aspirations.

This agreement gives Nigeria a chance to rebuild. Whether it becomes a renaissance or another chapter in the long story of squandered opportunity will depend on what happens next.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

In late 2024, it came into the open for the first time that the relationship between Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso and his protégé, Gov. Abba Kabiru Yusuf, had fractured. But it was quickly papered over and dismissed as mere noise, a distraction engineered by enemies of Kwankwasiyya.

Then a few people in Gov. Yusuf’s government, accused of standing in the way between Dr. Kwankwaso and Gov. Yusuf, were fired. The most prominent of such firings was that of Prof. Abdullahi Baffa Bichi, the Secretary to the Government (SSG).

Prof. Bichi’s firing shocked me, so I reached out to a friend of mine who seems to be deeply inserted into, or at least close to people who are denizens of, the Kwankwasiyya power structure to seek explanations for why Bichi was let go.

He confided that Prof. Bichi was one of the arrowheads of the people who were goading Gov. Yusuf to assert his independence from Dr. Kwankwaso. That shocked me.

It shocked me because when Dr. Kwankwaso called me sometime in late 2023, he was with Prof. Bichi. He introduced Bichi with a lot of enthusiasm and asked if I knew him because we are both professors who graduated from Bayero University.

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I said Bichi graduated before me but that I knew him by reputation because of his service as the Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) from 2016 to 2019. He had a major falling out with former Education Minister Adamu Adamu, which caused his unceremonious firing, about which I wrote at the time.

Kwankwaso spoke very highly of Bichi and said he wanted me to get close to him. We never did. Kwankwaso did not remember to send me Bichi’s phone number as he promised, and I never reminded him.

But they seemed to have a great chemistry, and I got the impression that Bichi was one of Kwankwaso’s metaphoric eyes in the government, a trusted sentinel planted at the nerve center of power.

You can imagine my shock when I was told that he was one of the engineers of a political divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso.

But now that the divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso appears to have happened even after Bichi has been sacrificed in the service of signaling the indissolubility of the political bond between them, what do we make of this?

Where is Bichi? What is he saying about all this? Is he having the last laugh?

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

Farouk Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Nigerians vs Nigerians: The SARS We Never Ended

By Mudashir ‘Dipo’ Teniola

In October 2020, millions of Nigerians poured into the streets during the historic #EndSARS protests, rising against decades of police brutality, extortion and arbitrary abuse by the now-defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force. The movement gained global attention and forced the government to announce the unit’s dissolution.

Yet, five years later, the deeper affliction that gave rise to that uprising remains largely untouched.

On 12 December 2025, Dangote Petroleum Refinery announced a major intervention in Nigeria’s downstream sector, cutting its ex-depot petrol price from about ₦828 per litre to ₦699 per litre — the most significant price reduction recorded that year. The refinery also introduced a 10-day credit facility for marketers, a move widely seen as a genuine opportunity to ease fuel prices, transport costs, and Nigeria’s crushing cost-of-living crisis.

Yet the nation barely stirred.

There was no widespread reduction in transport fares, no noticeable drop in food prices, no collective sigh of economic relief. Even as some marketers adjusted prices in line with the new benchmark, large segments of Nigeria’s petrol retail network continued selling fuel at ₦850–₦900 per litre, effectively neutralising the impact of the price cut.

The silence was telling — and troubling.

Nigerians rose against SARS because it embodied weaponised impunity: the arbitrary use of power to extract pain from citizens. But what SARS practised in uniform was already deeply embedded in everyday Nigerian life — the instinct to impose hardship on others whenever leverage exists.

SARS did not invent extortion. It merely wore a badge.

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Today, that same impulse thrives in the marketplace:

• Transport operators hike fares overnight, regardless of falling fuel prices.
• Landlords raise rents without corresponding improvements in services.
• Traders inflate prices based on rumours rather than actual costs.
• Relief materials and palliatives are hoarded, delayed, or monetised at every level.

This is not inflation in the classical economic sense. It is opportunism, unchecked and normalised — a social habit of transferring hardship to someone else because it is easier than mutual accommodation.

The Dangote petrol price reduction was a clear economic signal — a rare alignment of supply conditions with the possibility of real relief. Yet the market’s muted response exposed a deeper truth: we have normalised enforcing hardship against one another.

There are, of course, counter-arguments. Many rightly point to government responsibility — regulation, enforcement, price monitoring, and anti-profiteering laws. Governments are indeed meant to legislate and regulate. But the belief that law alone can civilise conduct ignores a basic moral reality: laws reflect values; they cannot replace them.

No law can follow every trader into a shop, every driver into a motor park, or every landlord into an estate to compel ethical behaviour. In societies where moral responsibility is fully outsourced to the state, citizens begin to see themselves as passive subjects rather than active participants in the economy.

This expectation — that government must police our morality — is itself part of the problem. It assumes fairness must be enforced, not practised.

If, in the face of a genuine reduction in petrol prices, Nigerians respond with silence rather than collective repricing; if we wait for enforcement instead of exercising restraint and fairness voluntarily; then we have not truly ended SARS — we have merely stripped it of its uniform.

True transformation must begin in the marketplace, not only in protest marches. It begins with a shared rejection of extractive behaviour, whether by those in uniform or by ordinary citizens wielding economic power.

Ending a police unit does not dismantle the social logic that produced it. The real SARS was never confined to the streets of Lagos or Abuja; it lived in the everyday choices Nigerians made when given power — often at the expense of one another.

Until that reality is confronted, the cycle of protest, policy announcements, and disappointment will continue.

Nigerians vs Nigerians: The SARS We Never Ended