ORPHANS AND BASTARDS: FEDERAL AND STATE UNIVERSITIES IN NIGERIA Jeff Godwin Doki Ph.D
It is no exaggeration to say that the crisis in Nigeria’s Tertiary education sector is a political one. And a quick look at the serial and cyclical crisis in Nigerian universities leaves no one in doubt that this is not an educational problem at all. It is a political crisis and it is a crisis of a ruling elite that has no use for public education because its own children do not attend public schools in Nigeria. Since the 1970s and 1980s crude militarism and authoritarianism, employing other violent tactics like coercion, intimidation, arrests and harassment, ensured that Agreements and MoUs signed with the Academic Staff of Universities were designed, even from the very beginning, to be violated. This trend has continued till this day and it has become part of the governance culture whether under military or civilian regimes. For close to four decades now the Nigerian state has waged a silent war against public education. And this war is a deliberate strategy: Underfunding, non-payment of salaries and allowances, refusal to honor Agreements—— all of these have become deliberate policy to keep Nigerian citizens ignorant so that they can easily be manipulated and ruled.Recall that the ASUU- FGN Agreement which was signed in December, 2025 started in 2006 and stretched to 2009. In 2009, the FGN signed the agreement with ASUU made up of all Federal and State Universities. The Government team was headed by Chief Gamaliel Onosode while ASUU was represented by Dr. Abdullahi Sule who was later replaced by Prof.Ukachukwu Awuzie, himself a Professor from a State University in Nigeria. Over the years, ASUU made series of efforts to get the government to renegotiate this very agreement. The efforts of ASUU bore some kind of fruit in March, 2017 when the government constituted a committee to renegotiate the 2009 Agreement. The first attempt was by the committee headed by Wale Babalakin which was botched and replaced by the committees of Jibril Munzali and Emeritus Prof. Nimi Briggs. At the end of the day, it was the Agreement submitted by the Alhaji Yayale Ahmed committee in February, 2025 that was renegotiated and signed in December 2025.
Then on January 14, 2026, the FGN decided to publicly unveil the agreement in Abuja with much mumbo-jumbo and fanfare that smacked of hypocrisy and deceit. When has the signing of an agreement become some national victory?
But let’s be clear on this point. The 2025 Agreement is not a gift to ASUU. Rather, the Agreement is a minimal, belated recognition of the rot in the university system. More worrisome is the fact that the Nigerian government has failed to implement that minimal component.
But again, the failure of the government to implement the 2025 Agreement tells us everything about the contempt with which it holds education.But here is the real irony: Nigeria hosts 312 universities (77 federal, 67 state, and 168 private) but the number of illiterate citizens in the country is on the rise every day and even among the literate many can merely read while only a few can think. State universities are the most tragic victims in Nigeria because they are at the mercy of Governors who see them as constituency projects to be commissioned and abandoned. State universities do not have autonomy.
Another way of putting this is to say that state universities are election projects and not institutions. A university whose Vice Chancellor is appointed by a Governor, whose budget is determined by a Commissioner and whose Governing Council can be dissolved by fiat is not a university. It is a parastatal. It is rather unfortunate that the university has become a place where the logic of primitive accumulation and predation plays itself out.
There is an obvious case of predation in all these. Deliberate underfunding, decay and rot on university campuses and incessant ASUU strikes are not accidents. They have become policy and a governing culture. To put it bluntly the ruling elite is engaged in a systematic destruction of public education.
The deliberate plan is to avoid building institutions that can challenge them.Very recently, more than twenty State and some Federal universities have threatened to embark on strike action if their demands are not met. And as at the time of writing this piece many State universities in Nigeria are on strike because of the non-implementation of the 2025 Agreement.
But why are their demands not met? It is simply because States and Federal governments starve universities of funds and blame lecturers and students when standards fall. Except States and Federal governments in Nigeria wake up to their social responsibilities we may experience another strike action in the coming days. And when that happens, we may lose not just semesters, we may lose a whole generation of thinkers and scientists. And when a nation loses its thinkers, it is left with only traders and thugs. When the strike begins students may pay in wasted years, the lecturers, as usual, may pay in unpaid salaries and broken morale. Only the political class may pay nothing. It is the same cycle of human stupidity and it happens when we allow education to become a commodity rather than an investment.
When we look at education as a privilege rather than a right, we are saying that only the children of the rich deserve to think while the children of the poor deserve only to labor. When education becomes a commodity the children of the poor are locked out and that creates a two -class system: expensive private schools for elites and collapsing public schools for the poor. But mark this: it is predatory politics at work, no more, no less.It is left to be said that the cup of the nation is full with lies and treacheries and the time has come for us to confront the predatory nature of the Nigerian state itself. No amount of TETFUND or NELFUND, will save us. It is not the number of State, Federal or private universities that can solve this problem. As a matter of fact, we have a point where Federal universities have become orphans while State universities double as bastards and rogues. It is squarely a political problem disguised by the ruling elite as an educational problem.
The grand plan is to destroy public education and the ruling elite knows fully well that when you destroy the university you destroy the factory for producing critical citizens. The end result is that you are left with a nation of consumers, hustlers, thieves, terrorists and thugs.
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