Why the Nigerian Government Moves Slowly on ASUU: The Incentive Problem

To understand why the Nigerian government treats ASUU strikes with such low urgency, imagine a hotel in Lagos or Abuja where the kitchen staff decide not to show up one morning. Breakfast isn’t prepared. Guests start complaining. Some demand refunds. Others threaten bad reviews. A few pack their bags and leave.

Within hours, management is in crisis mode. Not because they suddenly believe in justice for kitchen workers, but because the financial consequences hit immediately. A hotel cannot afford even a single day of disrupted service. Revenue bleeds in real time.

Now compare that to a public university.

When ASUU declares a strike, students pack their bags and go home. Parents complain to one another. Newspapers write a few headlines. But the government — the employer in this case — feels no instant financial shock. Universities don’t produce revenue the way hotels do. They are expenses on the government’s books, not sources of profit. If anything, a prolonged strike may even lighten the government’s spending because salaries are often withheld.

The fallout exists, but it is slow, spread out, and politically safe to ignore. Students lose months. Parents lose patience. Lecturers lose morale. But none of that creates a direct, same-day crisis for the government. The damage is long-term, which means it falls outside the short-term incentives that drive political decision-making.

A hotel fixes a strike before lunchtime because its survival depends on it.
A government can watch a strike stretch into six or eleven months because its survival does not.

That is the structural mismatch that explains the endless ASUU stalemates: the people who suffer most from the breakdown of education are not the same people who have the power to resolve it.