No Work, No Pay — What Has the Academics Got Wrong?
No Work, No Pay — What Has the Academics Got Wrong?
By Ayokunmi Olaoluwa
Each time the Federal Government clashes with the Academic Staff Union of Universities, one thing becomes clear, our leaders still don’t understand the value of intellect. The current “no work, no pay” policy is just another proof of that.
Yes, the law exists. Section 43 of the Trade Dispute Act gives government the right to withhold salaries during strikes. But law without fairness is tyranny in disguise. The lecturers’ protest didn’t spring from laziness or rebellion; it came from exhaustion, from decades of broken agreements, collapsing facilities, unpaid allowances, and a system that keeps asking scholars to perform miracles on empty stomachs.
When government officials chant no work, no pay, they forget the irony: it is the same academics they’re starving who produce the doctors, engineers, lawyers, and policymakers that keep the nation alive. You cannot keep punishing those who teach, then wonder why learning itself is dying.
For years, Nigerian lecturers have endured salaries that barely cover transport, research budgets that wouldn’t fund a single experiment abroad, and classrooms that resemble refugee shelters more than centers of learning. Yet these same people continue to teach, to supervise, to improvise, to hold the system together. If anyone has shown loyalty, it’s them, not the government that keeps defaulting on its promises.
The truth is, Nigeria’s “no work, no pay” approach exposes not strength but short-sightedness. Instead of fixing what drives the strikes; poor funding, outdated infrastructure, the humiliation of intellectual labour, our leaders prefer to punish those raising the alarm. It’s easier to silence the teachers than to repair the classroom.
The real tragedy is not the strikes; it’s what they reveal: a government that treats education as a nuisance rather than a national investment. When lecturers are forced to take side jobs just to survive, when research dies in its cradle, when students graduate half-baked because their mentors are distracted by hunger, that’s not just an academic problem. That’s a national emergency.
So maybe ASUU isn’t the villain after all. Maybe what Nigeria needs is less condemnation of its lecturers and more introspection from its leaders. Because until we start paying attention and paying properly to those who build the nation’s mind, the cycle of decay will keep repeating.
And when that happens, it won’t just be the universities that collapse. It’ll be the country itself.
_Ayokunmi Olaoluwa_