For 68 days, the gates of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko (AAUA), have stayed shut to learning, and on Thursday, the students’ patience finally gave way.
What began as a wait for the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and government officials to resolve their dispute turned into a full-scale street protest, as hundreds of students, led by their Students’ Union Government (SUG), poured onto the roads surrounding the campus, barricading the main gate and the highway link that connects the university to the rest of the state.
By mid-morning, traffic in the area had ground to a halt. Commercial drivers and commuters found themselves stranded as students, some draped in branch colours and clutching hand-painted placards, chanted solidarity songs and blocked all vehicular movement.
The messages on their placards left little room for ambiguity about the mood on campus: “Every pending graduate, shey na our lives be these?” “NASU, NAAT, and SSANU have joined strike,” and the now-familiar rallying cry, “Enough is Enough.”
The protest did not erupt without warning. The current shutdown traces back to a strike notice issued in mid-August, when the university’s ASUU chapter formally informed management that its members were embarking on an indefinite work stoppage over the state government’s failure to implement the 2025 Federal Government–ASUU agreement, an action the union framed as a demand for the accord’s implementation. It was not the first disruption AAUA had weathered this year.
Barely weeks earlier, the university had emerged from a separate strike over unpaid salary arrears, a dispute the state government appeared to have settled when Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa approved a special intervention fund of roughly ₦1.1 billion specifically earmarked for outstanding staff salaries.
The relief, however, proved short-lived, and academic activities collapsed again soon after.
For the students, the pattern of promises followed by fresh disruptions has become a source of mounting frustration, and, on Thursday, that frustration spilled onto the streets.
Addressing journalists at the protest ground, SUG President Comrade Folagbade Greatness Ayoola said the union could no longer watch in silence as the academic calendar unravelled.
He alleged that students were still being billed for school fees even as classes remained suspended, while lecturers, whose salaries were reportedly still being withheld in part, bore the brunt of the same dysfunction from the other side of the lectern.
According to Ayoola, ASUU had tabled its demands with government negotiators on multiple occasions, only for talks to break down, leaving the union with no option but an indefinite strike.
“We will continue to use legitimate means to press for the resolution of this crisis until the strike is called off,” Ayoola told reporters, insisting that the protest was a peaceful expression of the students’ collective anxiety rather than an act of provocation.
SUG General Secretary Oluwatimileyin Amos painted a picture of a student body caught in limbo. More than two months into the shutdown, he said, students were unsure whether to remain at home or return to a campus with no functioning academic calendar.
The uncertainty, he added, weighed most heavily on final-year students whose outstanding examinations, and by extension, their graduation timelines, remained indefinitely postponed.
The Students’ Senate President, Comrade Adebiyi Kehinde, offered a more measured but no less urgent appeal. He noted that the union had already engaged both university management and relevant stakeholders in earlier attempts to resolve the crisis, without success.
Kehinde called on the Ondo State government to step in decisively, stressing that the students’ overriding demand remained simple: a return to their classrooms.
Even as he pressed the case for government action, he urged fellow students to keep the protest peaceful and to continue trusting the union’s efforts rather than resorting to disorder.
Other students who spoke to reporters echoed the same refrain, a plea for the government to meet its financial obligations to the university so that lectures, examinations, and ultimately, graduations could resume.
Thursday’s protest is only the latest flashpoint in a strained relationship between AAUA’s student body and the authorities responsible for funding the institution.
In July, the union had issued the state government a 72-hour ultimatum over an earlier phase of the same dispute, warning that it had exhausted peaceful channels and was prepared to “invoke the last C of Aluta,” a reference to the union’s escalating tiers of protest if a satisfactory response was not forthcoming.
University management, for its part, has previously urged calm, insisting that the strike was receiving the state government’s attention and appealing to students to avoid public statements without first consulting officials.
Whether Thursday’s road blockade will produce a faster resolution than previous appeals remains to be seen. For now, the main gate of Adekunle Ajasin University stays shut, its lecture halls silent, and its thousands of students still waiting, many of them now wondering how much longer that wait will last.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
AAUA students are protesting an unresolved government failure, not lecturer stubbornness. After 68 days without classes, the strike persists because the Ondo State government hasn’t implemented the 2025 FGN-ASUU agreement despite prior interventions (like the ₦1.1bn salary fund) offering only temporary fixes.
Students are caught in the middle, still paying fees while lecturers go unpaid, with no end in sight until the government acts.
Thursday’s road blockade was less about anger at ASUU and more a desperate signal to authorities: resolve the agreement, or the disruption and student hardship will continue indefinitely.
