ASUU’s snake in Alausa’s monkey’s shadow

The gently-smouldering anger of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) should not be taken with levity by any thoughtful person, group or government. Nigerian academics, through their usually very potent union – ASUU are not known to make empty threats. They almost always come up with watertight arguments for its members’ welfare, national development and the advancement of tertiary education in Nigeria.

Some of us remember vividly the extent of endurance of this breed of Nigerians. Many of them went through a lot during the military era. Some of them fled the country for being outspoken against the ills of the military junta. They endured poor, irregular pay and stayed away from classrooms for many weeks and months on end. I recall the many months we languished at home in the hope that ASUU and the Federal Government would reach an agreement for academic activities to resume. During one of our long, painful and regular bouts of ASUU strikes in the 1990s, Professor S. T. Bajah told me that we had lost the 1995/96 session.

That was the first time ASUU strike would claim a whole session from students and lecturers. It happened again only in the life of the General Muhammadu Buhari administration. That time, the union went on strike and was on it for eight whole months! All ex-President Buhari could do was issue threats, and made good the threat of not paying these Nigerians for the entire time they spent on the industrial dispute with the government.

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Discerning Nigerians will agree that ASUU has long ceased to be after only their own welfare. ASUU came up with “My take home pay cannot take me home”, during the military era. It was as simple as it states: their remuneration was nothing to write home about. It was so poor that it could not even take them home. It might be a blatant hyperbole, but were they wrong? That mantra was representative of how poorly Nigerian lecturers were paid at that time, and that was one of the factors that gave birth to the concept that came to be simply described during the Ibrahim Babangida regime as “brain drain.”

This association has proven over the years that it is perhaps the most consistent among all pressure groups seeking proper growth and development of Nigeria. ASUU can pass as the most reliable when it comes to the fight for an egalitarian Nigeria. A look at the details of their demands will always point to a fight beyond better remuneration for ASUU members, it will show that they also want the right atmosphere for the proper tuition for their students, and the rejuvenation of the universities and indeed the entire academic environment.

ASUU’s recent rise against a decision of the Education Minister, Dr Tunji Alausa, is a pointer to this. The union sees as retrogressive the policy of the Federal Government that mother tongue should cease to be the language of instruction of primary school children in Nigeria. The position of ASUU conveyed in a recent statement by its president, Professor Chris Pinuwa, is an example of the union’s quest for better educational foundations for the overall and sustainable development of the country. The union said “In recent months, ASUU has been troubled by some policy pronouncements in the education sector which are anything but salutary.”

Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa’s name has not been far removed from controversial takes, actions and decisions. In May 2024, when he was the Minister of State for Health, he once stated that people were trooping to Nigeria from parts of Africa, India and Europe to access healthcare. In fact, he described the trend as a surge which he said was occasioned by the nice things happening in Nigeria’s health sector as well the improved healthcare services brought about through the robust policies of the government of President Bola Tinubu. It is ordinarily a nice thing to say by a minister about his government but it sounded not just very incredible, it came across to Nigerians as an outright falsehood considering the extant realities in the sector. The other problem with his tale is that it came in the midst of a heated trade dispute between doctors under the aegis of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), and the Nigerian government. The doctors through the NMA had fought for better salaries and working conditions and were at their wit’s end. Those among them who were still in Nigeria decided that the only other way left to get the government to do what was expected of them, was to embark on a total strike action. While the doctors creaked and groaned, DrAlausa said things weren’t as bad as they made it look, and that indeed foreign medical tourists were flocking to Nigeria from far and near to access healthcare because of its high quality and competitive cost.

On 3 May, 2025, this column had to scream at some decisions publicly announced by DrAlausa when he was a few months old as the new Minister of Education. He was obviously very excited with what he saw the previous month at a UTME examination centre in Bwari, Abuja that he probably forgot why he was at the UTME centre and, perhaps inadvertently, made a huge policy statement. There, on Monday, 28 April, 2025 he announced that WAEC and NECO examinations would be computer-based by November of the same year.

It was an upsetting announcement because, on 16 December, 2024 he met some stakeholders in education in Nigeria and announced a plan to shift to a computer-based testing system for national examinations in the country. The following month – January 2025, he set up a committee to see to that, and gave them a three-year timeframe for the planning and possible implementation of the migration. Then, during JAMB’s UTME of that year, there were complaints around centres, scheduling, and technical process of the examination. Alausa went with Prof IshaqOloyede of JAMB to one of the UTME centres in Bwari on inspection. This was on Monday, 28 April, 2025. While speaking after the inspection, he said WAEC and NECO among other examinations would be computer-based in November of the same year. It threw a spanner in the works of the committee he had set up himself, and at the same time threw the entire education sector, especially the secondary education sub-sector into total confusion.

Minister Alausa, on 13 November, 2025 announced the immediate cancellation of the indigenous language policy the Federal Government had adopted a little over three years ago. AdamuAdamu, the Minister of Education who announced the policy, said it came from the notion that children learn better when they are taught in their own mother tongue. This contention is supported by hordes of studies in early childhood education as well as by researches sponsored by the United Nations on early childhood education. This method of instruction will not only enhance learning and intuition among Nigerian young children, it will also help the credible quest to preserve indigenous languages of the peoples of Nigeria.

But, according to Minister Alausa, the policy had failed to yield expected results three years on, and lamented that data from WAEC, NECO and JAMB showed poor academic results, and that these poor results were traceable to the mother tongue teaching. Alausa conveniently ignored the arterial issues of abysmal infrastructure, almost non-available teaching materials, poor remuneration for teachers and the general low motivation in the Nigerian education sector. The minister chose to leave the festering leprosy to grittily attack the ringworm.

Now, the Minister of Education, DrMoruf Tunji Alausa has attracted the attention of the firm and sometimes stormy ASUU, which said it had been watching him. It has been expected, and now that it has come, he must gird his loins seriously with adequate logic and also prepare his feet for a marathon. It looks like, before now, the pigeon was in charge of spreading the policy-somersaults of Alausa; with ASUU on his case, he must realise that the chicken has come to the party. He must be ready for the university academics because they have not only accused the government of hanky-panky in the implementation of their December 2025 agreement, they have rejected the scrapping of the mother tongue policy. These matters are smouldering along with the other issues, and ASUU’s gentle rumbling might soon become a major eruption.

In its usually unmistakable terms, ASUU said the policy to abandon the mother tongue policy is “not only retrogressive but a great loss of past gains rooted in research.” It reminded the Federal Government that technologically and industrially advanced countries like Germany, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan, use their indigenous languages for teaching in the earliest years of formal education. They do this “recognising that children before the age of eight could master six or more languages without hampering their cognitive development,” ASUU stated and wondered “What research evidence informed the minister’s conclusion that the use of local languages has ‘significantly weakened” learning outcomes?”

Language is a repository of culture and tradition of a people. DrAlausa does not like ideas such as this, we must therefore kill our indigenous languages for English, a second or even third language which has neither aided us nor nourished the need for cultural and economic emancipation. So there is ASUU in the mix and Alausanow has something to look at.