By Mahdi Waziri Isa
In a sharp rebuke of the Federal Government’s “no work, no pay” threat, a prominent member of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has condemned the administration’s handling of the ongoing industrial dispute, labeling its approach as “calculated wickedness” and accusing the Minister of Education of misleading the public.
The criticism comes from Professor Abdelghaffar Amoka, a Don from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, who, in a public article titled “ASUU Strike: Dear Minister, why misinforming the public?”, detailed the union’s frustrations just as a two-week warning strike commenced on October 13, 2025.
Professor Amoka directly challenged the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, on his claims of governmental sincerity. He questioned the Minister’s assertion of having approved a “robust teaching allowance,” demanding transparency. “He refuses to mention what was approved for the supposed robust teaching allowance, when it was approved, and who has been paid,” Amoka wrote.
The academic singled out the government’s negotiation tactics as evidence of bad faith, describing a cycle of delay and disregard. He pointed to a renegotiation committee whose report was allegedly shelved for nine months before the same committee was re-inaugurated.
At the heart of the dispute, according to Amoka, is a “calculated wickedness and a deliberate ploy” to break the academic community. He asserted that keeping academics on the same salary for 16 years is a strategic move to suppress intellectual dissent. “The idea is to kill their ideological strength by making their brain preoccupied with what to eat for the day,” he argued.
Professor Amoka described the conflict as a fundamental struggle for the soul of the nation’s intellectual future. “Academics are the intellectual backbone of society… the custodians of civilisation,” he wrote.
He warned that a nation cannot thrive when its academics are forced to “beg the political class before they can feed themselves and their families.”
Responding to the government’s threat of a “no work, no pay” policy, Amoka dismissed it as an unoriginal tactic. He concluded that the union’s two years of patience have been exhausted. “This is the time for action and not threat,” he declared.
Professor Amoka ended with a stark message to students, stating: “To our students, ASUU has every right to a protest strike. You also have the right to stage protests for an end to the strike. Sleeping behind your mommy and lamenting that when 2 elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. There is only one elephant (the political class), the rest of us are grass. The lecturers and the students are the grasses.”