The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has issued a fresh warning that it may resume its suspended nationwide strike, accusing the Federal Government of dragging its feet on unpaid salaries and the implementation of the 2025 FGN-ASUU Agreement.
The warning came from ASUU President Christopher Piwuna, who addressed the matter in a statement released in Abuja on Friday, following an emergency meeting of the union’s National Executive Council (NEC).
According to the union, three-and-a-half months of a seven-and-a-half-month salary shortfall owed to lecturers remain unpaid, even as the Tinubu administration has cleared four of those months.
Piwuna did not mince words about the government’s follow-through on the December 2025 accord, describing its rollout as poor across both federal and state institutions.
He noted the deal was reached only after well over eight years of sustained struggle by the union, a reminder of just how long-running the fight over university funding and lecturer welfare has been.
Beyond the headline salary arrears, ASUU’s grievances run deeper. The union says it is still grappling with unremitted pension contributions, cooperative and check-off deductions, and unpaid promotion arrears, a combination it describes as both a financial and psychological strain on its members.
Left unresolved, the union warns, these issues could tip the situation back into a full-blown nationwide walkout.
For anyone who has followed Nigeria’s higher education sector, this standoff will feel familiar. ASUU has a long history of industrial action tied to unmet government commitments.
The union’s most recent major strike stretched across eight months in 2022, triggered by disputes over funding, earned allowances and the implementation of an even older 2009 agreement, and it only ended after the National Industrial Court ordered lecturers back to work. Before that, a roughly nine-month strike in 2020 centered on the IPPIS payment platform and unpaid allowances.
Negotiations resumed in 2025, eventually producing the new agreement signed on January 14, 2026, a deal that promised a 40 percent increase in lecturer remuneration, a new professorial allowance, and adjustments to existing academic allowances.
The government began rolling out the 40 percent bump to the Consolidated Academic Allowance in February, backdated to the start of the year.
But implementation has been uneven. By late June, ASUU’s Benin Zone covering Edo, Delta, and Ondo states was already threatening its own indefinite strike over what it called non-payment of agreed allowances, including the Consolidated Academic Tools Allowance (CATA).
The government responded earlier this month, releasing funds on September 9 to cover eight months of CATA payments for staff across federal universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education.
Taken together, the timeline suggests a government making incremental progress, with some allowances paid and some percentage increases implemented while broader financial obligations, including the outstanding salary arrears and pension remittances, remain unresolved. For ASUU, that partial compliance is apparently not enough to keep the strike threat off the table.
Whether the union follows through will likely depend on how quickly and how comprehensively the federal government moves to close the remaining gaps. For now, Nigeria’s public universities remain in a familiar holding pattern: classes continue, but the threat of disruption hangs over the new academic year.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
ASUU’s threat to resume strike action boils down to one core issue: the federal government has made partial progress but not full commitment.
Salaries have been paid but not in full (four of seven-and-a-half months), and some allowances have started flowing (like the CATA disbursement on September 9), but critical obligations pension remittances, deductions, and promotion arrears remain outstanding.
The pattern here matters more than any single number: Nigeria’s government has a history of signing agreements with ASUU, then under-delivering on implementation, which has repeatedly pushed the union back toward strike action (as seen in 2020 and 2022).
This latest warning suggests that history may be repeating itself unless the government closes the remaining gaps quickly and comprehensively, not just symbolically.
