The latest ASUU strike in Lagos looks familiar because much of the argument behind it is familiar.
On September 15, the Academic Staff Union of Universities Joint Campus Group covering Lagos State University, Lagos State University of Education and Lagos State University of Science and Technology declared a total and indefinite strike.
The immediate dispute is the implementation of the 2025 agreement between the government and ASUU, including provisions affecting academic staff welfare. The union said it had issued the Lagos State Government a 14-day ultimatum before taking the decision.
But this is where the latest strike becomes more than another education-sector labour story.
It raises a question that has followed Nigeria’s university system for decades: how many times can the same dispute be settled, suspended and reopened before a strike stops being an exceptional event and becomes part of the way the system operates?
Tinubu’s administration has already seen the cycle
President Bola Tinubu came into office in May 2023 promising an administration in which ASUU strikes would not become a recurring disruption.
For more than two years, the national university system largely avoided another prolonged ASUU shutdown after the eight-month nationwide strike of 2022. By August 2025, reports described the uninterrupted academic period as having lasted more than two years.
That period ended in October 2025.
ASUU commenced a two-week nationwide warning strike on October 13, 2025, over unresolved agreements and welfare issues. The union suspended the action on October 22, five days before the announced two-week period ended, after negotiations with the government resumed.
That means the nationwide ASUU strike record under Tinubu is not a simple succession of the prolonged shutdowns that characterised the previous administration.
But neither has the underlying dispute disappeared.
Instead, it has repeatedly moved between national negotiations and individual university or state-level confrontations.
Then came another agreement
One of the central problems is that an agreement ending one dispute does not necessarily end the institutional problems that produced it.
The Federal Government and ASUU signed a new agreement on January 14, 2026. The government subsequently said the deal included a 40 per cent salary increase for academic staff, improved pensions and commitments relating to university funding.
By April, the Federal Government was publicly declaring that the era of ASUU strikes had effectively been brought to an end.
The Education Minister, Tunji Alausa, said the government had resolved the longstanding disputes under the 2025 FG-ASUU agreement and assured students that universities would remain open.
Five months later, ASUU was warning that it could reactivate its suspended nationwide strike.
On September 12, the union said poor implementation of the 2025 agreement, unpaid salaries and unremitted deductions were again pushing the public university system towards another industrial dispute.
Three days later, the Lagos ASUU Joint Campus Group actually walked out.
That sequence is the real story.
Strike, agreement, implementation, strike
Nigeria’s university crisis increasingly resembles a loop.
Government and ASUU negotiate.
An agreement is reached.
The government announces that the dispute has been resolved.
Implementation begins unevenly or becomes contested.
ASUU issues warnings and ultimatums.
A strike follows.
Negotiations resume.
The strike is suspended.
Then another disagreement emerges over the implementation of the same or a successor agreement.
The 2025 experience illustrates the problem.
ASUU had already been protesting delays in the renegotiated agreement before the nationwide strike. In August 2025, the union and the Nigeria Labour Congress were demanding movement on the agreement and warning that failure to conclude it could trigger industrial action.
Two months later, the warning became a nationwide strike.
And now, in 2026, the implementation of the subsequent agreement is itself at the centre of another confrontation.
Lagos has its own version of the cycle
The pattern is even more visible at LASU.
The Lagos university system experienced another industrial dispute in 2025, with ASUU-LASU protesting the non-implementation of the 25–35 per cent salary increase approved by the Federal Government and other outstanding issues. The ICIR reported at the time that the 2025 action followed another strike involving the institution’s Joint Action Committee in December 2024.
Now the three Lagos state-owned universities are again shut by an indefinite ASUU action.
So, depending on whether the count is being made nationally or specifically within Lagos, the answer is different.
Nationally, the Tinubu administration has experienced one completed nationwide ASUU strike — the October 2025 two-week warning strike — before the current Lagos action.
At the Lagos state-university level, however, industrial disputes have occurred repeatedly during the same period, including the 2024/2025 disputes and the latest September 2026 shutdown.
That distinction matters because calling every ASUU dispute under Tinubu a “nationwide strike” would overstate what has actually happened.
What would make this strike different?
The immediate question is not whether ASUU will eventually return to negotiations.
Historically, that is usually what happens.
The harder question is whether negotiations produce a mechanism that prevents the same agreements from becoming the subject of another industrial dispute.
ASUU’s September 2026 national warning suggests the problem remains unresolved beyond Lagos. The union says some states have started implementing parts of the 2025 agreement, while others have pledged to begin implementation later in 2026. It has also raised issues over withheld salaries and deductions.
That creates a problem that cannot necessarily be solved by another meeting between ASUU and the Federal Government.
State-owned universities operate within a different political and financial structure from federal universities. A national agreement may therefore require state governments to take their own implementation steps.
The Lagos strike is evidence of precisely that problem.
The government says the problem has been solved. ASUU says implementation is the problem.
That contradiction is now central to the dispute.
The Federal Government declared in April that the major ASUU disputes had been resolved following the January agreement.
ASUU’s position months later is that the agreement has not been implemented sufficiently to prevent another industrial crisis.
Both statements cannot describe the same situation in the same way.
The difference is between reaching an agreement and making the agreement work across Nigeria’s fragmented university system.
And that is where the familiar strike cycle begins again.
Students are left measuring time in strikes
For students, the distinction between a federal agreement and a state implementation dispute is academic.
When lecturers stop teaching, academic calendars are disrupted regardless of which government is responsible for the outstanding commitment.
That is why the recurring ASUU crisis has consequences beyond salaries and union negotiations.
A 2025 analysis cited by The Guardian recalled research presented by former University of Ibadan Vice-Chancellor Idowu Olayinka showing that Nigerian universities lost a cumulative six years and three months of academic time to strikes between 1988 and 2022.
The number is a measure of how deeply industrial disputes have become embedded in the university system.
The question facing the Tinubu administration now is therefore larger than whether it can end the latest Lagos strike.
It is whether the government, ASUU and state university authorities can create a system in which an agreement remains an agreement after the cameras leave the negotiating room.
Because if implementation repeatedly becomes the next dispute, then every agreement contains the possibility of the next strike.
And the cycle remains exactly what students and parents have seen before:
strike, negotiation, agreement, implementation dispute — and strike again.
