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2 weeks ago
12
Commentaries
September 3, 2025 by Our Reporter
Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe
- By Peter Ovie Akus
Sir: I was shocked by the recent disclosure by Professor Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, immediate past vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), at a public forum where he lamented the poor pay of lecturers. He stated that no fewer than 239 first class graduates of UNILAG employed as lecturers left the institution within seven years.
In a country where the labour market is saturated, I can only imagine the depths of frustration that must have pushed these young, academically, and intellectually gifted lecturers to quit academia in exchange for seeking greener pastures elsewhere.
The persistent low pay for lecturers and the concomitant strikes that often follows it, has become a recurring decimal which disrupts the country’s higher educational system. Yet, successive administrations have paid lip service to this critical issue.
Emmanuel Osodeke, the immediate past president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), once declared that Nigerian lecturers were among the lowest paid in the world. He pointed out that in some African countries, no lecturer earns less than $2,000 (about N3.3 million) monthly, with professors earning up to $10,000 (around N16.5 million) monthly. Professor Ogundipe on his part, revealed that as vice chancellor, he earned a monthly salary of just N900,000 (approximately $580).
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Still a professor in the system, his salary is slightly above N700,000 before tax deductions.
I am not unaware that there are people who would read these figures and see nothing wrong with them. But if you look at it from the perspective of wages being a reward for value, you would see the danger ahead of us. Teaching is the foundation of every profession in the world. Without teachers, you cannot have doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. If we continue to pay lecturers peanuts, what will happen is that we would begin to attract low-quality lecturers while the high-quality lecturers either go overseas or pursue careers in other sectors. Low-quality lecturers inevitably means low-quality doctors, low-quality lawyers, low-quality engineers, etc. which will ultimately result in a low-quality nation.
I doubt if there is any millennial or Gen Z who has gone through the public university system in Nigeria and did not suffer from the effects of strikes by lecturers. A four-year course would automatically be studied in five or six years without failing any course due to strikes for better pay by lecturers.
Now we are hearing of another impending strike that has been dubbed as “the mother of all strikes”. President Bola Tinubu should ensure that no ASUU strike occurs during his tenure, as he promised. The easiest way to do this is 100 per cent implementation of the 2009 MOU with ASUU. Education is a vital sector that deserves adequate funding. Lecturers deserve a living wage.
•Peter Ovie Akus,
Ontario, Canada.
English (US)