The National Association of Academic Technologists has issued its most urgent and unambiguous warning yet to the federal government, declaring that a comprehensive industrial action across Nigeria’s university system had moved from a possibility to a near certainty unless the government urgently reconvened renegotiation talks and committed to concluding a fair and binding agreement, while simultaneously condemning what the union characterised as a deliberate and calculated attempt to fragment university workers through unilateral wage awards that circumvented the collective bargaining process.
In a strongly worded communique signed by NAAT President Ibeji Nwokoma and issued at the conclusion of its 62nd National Executive Council meeting at the National Secretariat Complex in Abuja, the union placed sole and unambiguous responsibility for any resulting disruption to academic activities squarely on the federal government, arguing that it was the government’s repeated, documented, and inexcusable failure to honour its collective bargaining obligations that was forcing workers toward a confrontation that nobody in the education sector wanted.
The union’s central and most immediate grievance focused on a letter dated March 30, 2026, from the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation to the Salaries, Income and Wages Commission, which approved a 30 percent allowance increase for certain categories of non-teaching staff while NAAT’s own renegotiation remained incomplete and no final agreement had been signed. The association condemned the action as a unilateral interference with the collective bargaining process, a violation of the established principles of wage negotiation that had governed relations between the government and university workers for decades, and a deliberate strategy to create damaging and unjustifiable pay disparities between different categories of university staff who had all been waiting for the same renegotiation process to be concluded.
NAAT formally rejected the offer tabled at the National Universities Commission on March 31, 2026, describing it as wholly and insultingly inadequate given the dramatic erosion of workers’ real purchasing power caused by the soaring costs of fuel, cooking gas, and electricity that had fundamentally transformed the economic circumstances of Nigerian workers since the base year of the 2009 agreement. The union declared it would resist the unilateral award through every available legal means and would not be divided or distracted from its core demand for a comprehensive and fair renegotiation outcome.
The union noted that renegotiation of the 2009 agreement, which was originally scheduled for review in 2012 under the agreement’s own three-year review cycle, had now dragged on for nine years and passed through four separate government-appointed committees without producing a final binding outcome, despite NAAT’s consistent, documented, and patient engagement throughout the entire period. The committees had been chaired successively by Dr. B.O. Babalakin in 2017, Professor Munzali Jibril in 2020, the late Professor Nimi Briggs in 2022, and the current committee under Alhaji Mahmud Yayale Ahmed inaugurated in 2024.
The union called on a broad coalition of civil society organisations, religious bodies, the Nigeria Labour Congress, students, and parents to add their collective voices to pressure the government to reconvene promptly and bring the renegotiation to an honourable, comprehensive, and binding conclusion without further delay.
