On the surface, it may appear that there is a negligible discernible link between the ongoing far-reaching economic reforms of the President Bola Tinubu administration, the newly signed agreement between the administration and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the fundamental challenge of achieving enduring, autochthonous national development in Nigeria. Not surprisingly, dominant sections of the traditional and social media have treated the newfound amity between the Federal Government and ASUU as being of only tangential and ephemeral significance. With the distorting influence of unbridled partisanship on the part of key sections of the media, it is so easy to forget or downplay the deleterious impact of frequent and protracted strikes by federal and state public universities over the last one and a half decades on education, the economy and the country’s development in general.
It is no surprise that the academics have commended the determination, sincerity of purpose and tenacity of the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, in spearheading the breakthrough recorded by the Tinubu administration in resolving the deadlock between ASUU and successive preceding administrations on the implementation of the stillborn 2009 agreement. Highlights of the new agreement reached on December 24, 2025, and which took effect on January 1, 2026, include a 40% upward review of salaries for academics; a new Consolidated Academic Tools Allowance (CATA) of N1.74 million and N840,000 million annually for full Professors and Readers respectively; enhanced pension benefits that allow professors to earn a pension equivalent to their annual salary on retirement at the age of 70 and the enhancement of research funding through the provision of at least 1% of Nigeria’s GDP for the National Research Council (NRC).
Of course, the most critical challenge is for the government to commence and sustain the implementation of all aspects of this agreement to boost the morale of the country’s academics and unleash their hitherto trapped potentials to contribute exponentially to the attainment of national transformation goals. But there is cause for optimism. As the BusinessDay newspaper put it in a report, “The agreement marks the first time a sitting Nigerian President directly took ownership of the prolonged dispute and prioritised its resolution. Tunji Alausa, Minister of Education, said the agreement is intended to restore trust, guarantee uninterrupted academic calendars, and end the cycle of strikes in public universities. ASUU said the agreement is the outcome of a renegotiation process that began in 2017 and passed through multiple failed committees before the current administration inaugurated the Yayale Ahmed-led renegotiation committee in December 2024.
Structural reforms undertaken by successive governments, civilian and military, in post-colonial Nigeria have addressed the country’s economic crisis, often at a superficial level, without confronting the more daunting problem of transcending the conundrum of underdevelopment. It is impossible to achieve the latter without taking maximal advantage of the knowledge, skills, creativity and cerebral energy of the country’s intellectuals. And the latter will remain a mirage with a depressed, demotivated, largely neglected and demoralised intellectual class. This is why the new agreement between the Federal Government and ASUU must be built upon to usher in a new era of mobilising Nigeria’s intellectual resources to achieve national developmental goals.
Over the last two and a half years, the Tinubu administration’s reforms, external and internal assessors agree, have gone a long way to address the severe, multidimensional economic crises it inherited as a result of years of structural distortions, misplaced priorities and indulgent policies that purportedly subsidised the disadvantaged but facilitated the criminal enrichment of a parasitic minority. Examples were the fuel subsidy and parallel exchange rate markets meant to boost the value of the Naira but provided avenues for humongous self-enrichment through arbitrage for the well-connected. The abolition of these policies by the Tinubu administration, measures acknowledged as imperative by its predecessors but incessantly pushed forward, led to immediate hardships through inflationary spirals and attendant spike in living costs.
But the bitter pills are evidently having the desired recuperative effects on the ailing economy. It is apposite to quote the latest edition of The Economist magazine at some length here. Stating that the administration’s painful reforms are beginning to show results, the magazine notes that “It is difficult to overstate the mess Mr Tinubu inherited. When he took office in 2023, the country’s Central Bank had $7 billion (equivalent to 1.4% of GDP at the time) in obligations it could not meet, prompting international investors to flee en masse. The bank’s credibility had been dented by a recklessly loose monetary policy, its mismanagement of dwindling foreign -exchange reserves and efforts to maintain an unsustainable tiered exchange -rate system. In 2022 alone, the cash-strapped government spent some $10 billion, equivalent to 2.2% of GDP, on a ruinous fuel subsidy”.
After reiterating the painful remedial measures undertaken by the Tinubu administration to reform and restructure the economy, The Economist observes that “Nearly three years on, Nigeria’s 230 million people, especially the poor and the middle class, are still reeling from increases in fuel and food prices. Poverty has risen. But it looks as though Mr Tinubu’s bitter medicine is helping. The annual inflation rate, which hit a nearly 30-year high of of 35.8% in December 2025, fell to 15.2% in December 2025. Growth is returning. The IMF expects the economy to expand by 4.4% in 2026. Following two steep devaluations in 2023, the Naira has stabilised. The Central Bank’s foreign -exchange reserves have risen to $46 billion, their highest level in seven years. Improvements in macroeconomic stability are restoring investor confidence”.
The challenge before the Tinubu administration is to push through these reforms till they become sustainable and irreversible, but, more importantly, to ensure that impressive statistical indices are translated into concrete improved welfare and living standards for the vast majority of Nigerians. Even if these goals are achieved, however, the administration would have addressed the problem of the economic crisis and must still lay the foundation for transcending the protracted crisis of underdevelopment. And this is where the intellectuals and the unique labour union that ASUU has become are indispensable.
In the final analysis, no country or people can develop another political entity. All meaningful development is ultimately self-development. In its Nigeria First policy, which emphasises local raw materials, expertise and technology in production processes, Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda realises this. And so it is with its efforts to break the country’s food dependency and boost local agricultural productivity, even though continuing unacceptable levels of insecurity remain a major obstacle in critical food production zones. However, the administration must fundamentally redefine, refocus and restructure the country’s theory and practice of development.
Relying on external expertise, inputs and technology for the installation of major artefacts of development and modernity, such as railway tracks and trains, express roads and coastal highways, ultramodern structures, model stadia, and petroleum refineries are inevitable in the short run but do not constitute development on a long-term, sustainable basis. As one of the country’s eminent political economists, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, puts it, “What is needed is a concept of development which is neither viewed as catching up with the advanced countries nor fixated on the procurement of artefacts. Under certain conditions, artefacts emanate from the development process and reflect it. This is so only when they are the end products of the efforts of the population to apply their creative energy to the transformation of the local, physical, biological and socio-cultural environments. This is the case in the advanced countries. They cease to mirror development when they are provided by foreigners; the local population merely acquires the products of other people’s development.”
Over four decades ago, ASUU, in its landmark publication, ‘The Nigerian Economic Crisis: Causes and Solutions,’ made the same point with regard to the country’s industrialisation process. In its words, “By industrialization of the country, we mean the process of developing the capacity of that country to master and locate within its borders, the whole industrial production process: production of raw materials; production of intermediate products for other industries; fabrication of machines and tools required for the manufacture of desired products and of other machines; skills to operate, maintain and reconstruct machines and tools; skills to manage factories and to organize the production process”.
• To be continued
