We Turned Our Lecturers into Low-Class Citizens, and Now the System Bleeds|By Ayokunmi Olaoluwa_
We Turned Our Lecturers into Low-Class Citizens, and Now the System Bleeds
As ASUU begins a two-week warning strike, Nigeria once again confronts the cost of neglecting its lecturers.
Once respected as custodians of knowledge, Nigeria’s university lecturers now find themselves battling humiliation and survival. The same people who once stood tall in lecture halls, shaping the nation’s intellectual future, now wait months for unpaid salaries. Their dignity has been quietly stripped away by years of neglect.
This is not just a crisis of wages. It is a moral and intellectual decay, one that began when the nation decided that education could thrive on empty promises. Successive governments have turned a blind eye to the crumbling state of the tertiary system, leaving classrooms underfunded and lecturers underpaid.
Today, many of the brightest minds are walking away. Some have relocated abroad where their skills are valued. Others have taken to side hustles; driving ride-hailing cars, running small businesses, or trading goods, simply to make ends meet. Those who stay behind continue to work under a cloud of frustration and fatigue.
The ongoing two-week warning strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is not an act of defiance; it is a symptom of deep institutional failure. Federal universities across Nigeria began the industrial action today, marking yet another chapter in the long, painful struggle between the union and the government. Behind every shutdown lies a story of unpaid salaries, outdated facilities, and dwindling morale. Yet, the public often responds with irritation rather than empathy, forgetting that the same system now failing its lecturers will one day fail its students.
We cannot continue to demand world-class education while treating lecturers as afterthoughts in national planning. When knowledge bearers lose hope, the classroom becomes a graveyard of potential. The consequences are already visible: half-baked graduates, disrupted calendars, and a slow erosion of public trust in the value of a university degree.
The ASUU strike should not be seen as another episode in Nigeria’s endless cycle of academic unrest. It should be a wake-up call, a reminder that education is not an expense, but an investment. A country that starves its lecturers starves its own future.
The time to act is now. Policymakers must listen, parents must care, and society must remember that the foundation of every thriving nation rests on the shoulders of its educators. Because without lecturers, there is no university, and without the university, there is no progress.
_Ayokunmi Olaoluwa
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