Last updated: September 9, 2026. This is a running story, we’re committing to a weekly refresh of the strike-status table below for as long as these disputes continue, so bookmark this page rather than a screenshot of it.
Let’s be precise about what’s actually happening: this is not a nationwide ASUU strike. It’s branch-level industrial action spreading across a growing list of mostly state-owned Nigerian universities, authorised at ASUU’s National Executive Council (NEC) meeting held at the University of Abuja on August 8–9, 2026, in a resolution signed by ASUU President Prof. Christopher Piwuna. Twenty universities were named in that original ultimatum. As of today, at least five have followed through into confirmed strike action or a scheduled one, with more branches still in the ultimatum or negotiation stage. Almost every branch’s core complaint is the same: slow or incomplete implementation of the 2025 FGN-ASUU agreement, including unpaid arrears.
If you’re a student at an affected institution, or you’re in a registrar’s or VC’s office trying to plan around this, here’s the current picture — verified and dated, with a weekly refresh going forward.
Which Nigerian universities are on strike right now?
| Institution | State | Type | Action declared | Status as of Sept 9, 2026 |
| Adekunle Ajasin University (AAUA), Akungba-Akoko | Ondo | State-owned | Indefinite strike, Aug 11, 2026 | Ongoing (29 days) |
| Olusegun Agagu University of Science & Technology (OAUSTECH), Okitipupa | Ondo | State-owned | Indefinite strike, Aug 11–12, 2026 | Ongoing |
| Plateau State University (PLASU), Bokkos | Plateau | State-owned | Total, comprehensive, indefinite strike, Aug 26, 2026 | Ongoing |
| Sule Lamido University (SLUK), Kafin Hausa | Jigawa | State-owned | Two-week warning strike, resolved Sept 8, 2026 | Scheduled — begins midnight Sept 15, 2026; has not started |
| Nnamdi Azikiwe University (NAU / UNIZIK), Awka | Anambra | Federal | Indefinite strike, Sept 7, 2026 | Ongoing — separate dispute (see note below) |
A note on that last row: NAU/UNIZIK isn’t part of the 20-university NEC ultimatum over the 2025 agreement. Its branch invoked ASUU’s separate “no pay, no work” standing policy after the university failed to pay complete August 2026 salaries, according to a statement from chapter chairperson Innocent Nnubia and secretary Osita Nnajiofor. It’s a different dispute with the same result: no lectures.
At AAUA, chapter chairman Prof. Bolu Oshodi told the News Agency of Nigeria the strike would continue until the state government implements the agreement and pays arrears dating to January 2026 — while noting other state-owned universities, including Ekiti State University and Kwara State University, had already implemented the new salary structure. Ondo State subsequently approved a 60% increase in subventions to state-owned tertiary institutions, but as of early September, the AAUA branch says it hasn’t been formally briefed on the terms and the strike continues. On September 3, AAUA’s Students’ Union Government blocked the university’s main gate and nearby roads in protest, with SSANU, NASU, and NAAT unions also joining the action there, according to reporting from Akure that day.
At PLASU, chairperson Vincent D. Choji and secretary Lomka Kopdiya cited a six-point charter: commencement of the Contributory Pension Scheme, full implementation of the 2025 agreement, payment of arrears from January 1, 2026, safe staff quarters, perimeter security (including trenches around the campus fence), and an end to what the union described as intimidation of union leaders.
At SLUK, the union’s 54th Regular Congress on September 8 said it was “not satisfied with the offer brought forward by the Government Team” from Jigawa State, and resolved to proceed with the warning strike “in the first instance”, meaning it could escalate to a total, indefinite strike if the response after two weeks remains unsatisfactory. That escalation has not happened, and the warning strike itself has not yet started as of this writing.
We’ll update this table weekly for as long as branch-level action continues. If your institution isn’t listed and you believe it should be, that likely means its branch is still in the ultimatum or negotiation stage rather than an active strike, check back for updates.
What is ASUU actually demanding?
Setting aside institution-specific grievances, the recurring demands across affected branches cluster around a few things:
- Full implementation of the 2025 FGN-ASUU agreement, reached after prolonged negotiations concluded in December 2025. Among its provisions is a 40% increase in academic staff remuneration effective January 1, 2026, along with the Consolidated Academic Tools Allowance (CATA), Earned Academic Allowance (EAA), and a professorial allowance.
- Payment of arrears: most branches are demanding backdated pay from January 2026, the effective date of the new salary structure.
- Pension and welfare issues specific to individual branches, such as PLASU’s push to commence the Contributory Pension Scheme.
- IPPIS exemption: SLUK, among others, wants the university removed from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, arguing it doesn’t fit the institution’s structure.
- State-level funding disputes, like SLUK’s objection to Jigawa State’s reduction of its statutory Local Government Contribution to the university.
At its August NEC meeting, ASUU also raised separate concerns about campus security and contested professorial promotions at a small number of universities, issues distinct from the salary dispute but folded into the same NEC resolution.
We’re reporting these as the union’s stated positions. Where a state government has responded, as Ondo State did with its subvention increase, or Jigawa did with a counter-offer ASUU’s Kafin Hausa branch rejected as unsatisfactory, we’ve noted that too.
How is NELFUND being funded, and how much has it disbursed?
Separately from the strikes, Nigeria’s student loan agency has had a significant few weeks.
The scale, as of August 8, 2026: NELFUND has disbursed ₦322.69 billion since its Student Loan Portal launched in May 2024, according to figures NELFUND itself has publicised and that were highlighted in Leadership newspaper’s August 2026 profile of the agency. Of that total, roughly ₦192.89 billion (about 60%) went to institutional fee payments covering 319 beneficiary institutions, and roughly ₦129.80 billion (about 40%) went to student upkeep support. The fund has processed more than 1.6 million loan applications in total. NELFUND’s MD/CEO is Akintunde Sawyerr; its board chairman is Jim Ovia.
The new funding directive: On August 19, 2026, Education Minister Dr Tunji Alausa told State House correspondents after that week’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting that President Bola Tinubu had directed a new funding stream into NELFUND. It’s worth being precise about what this actually covers, because the minister himself was precise about it: it applies specifically to funds already recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) that are liquid, legally cleared, and free of any pending litigation, not seized properties, and not funds still tied up in court. “Every single fund that is still subject to any legal challenge will not be part of the money that will be transferred to NELFUND,” Alausa said. The FEC also approved mobilising eligible resources from the Capital Market’s Unclaimed Dividends Trust Fund and the Dormant Accounts Trust Fund toward NELFUND, subject to the laws governing those funds.
This builds on an earlier, similar move: in August 2024, the EFCC transferred ₦50 billion in recovered proceeds of crime to NELFUND on President Tinubu’s directive, a transfer the EFCC itself publicly clarified at the time was “not a donation” by the commission, but government-directed use of funds already recovered and remitted to the state.
In short: this is a policy decision about where the government routes money it has already legally recovered, not a finding of any wrongdoing at NELFUND. NELFUND’s leadership welcomed the announcement; board chairman Jim Ovia said it “reinforces the administration’s commitment to making access to higher education more inclusive and sustainable.”
Why are 34 institutions under investigation over student refunds?
This is a separate NELFUND story, and the distinction matters: it’s not about fraud findings, it’s about allegations under investigation, and the underlying issue is a timing problem, not (as far as has been publicly established) deliberate overcharging.
In a July 2026 interview on Arise Television, MD/CEO Akintunde Sawyerr said NELFUND was looking closely at roughly 34 tertiary institutions over unresolved student refunds. The root cause, per Sawyerr: President Tinubu had directed that the loan scheme begin mid-academic-session rather than at the start of a new one, which meant many students paid their own tuition to meet registration deadlines while their loan applications were still being processed. When NELFUND’s payment to the institution then landed on top of the student’s own payment, the institution ended up holding a duplicate payment, and, in a number of cases, allegedly didn’t return it to the student. “What happened is that a lot of schools got double payment. Some from the students, some from us,” Sawyerr said, adding that the institutions, not NELFUND, are responsible for issuing the refund.
Sawyerr said a five-member team, including EFCC operatives and NELFUND’s internal auditors, has been deployed to examine the affected institutions, and that many students had separately petitioned the EFCC and the ICPC directly. He also acknowledged NELFUND has no legal power to compel a refund or prosecute an institution that doesn’t comply. No institution has been named in the reporting we’ve reviewed, and none is confirmed to have engaged in deliberate wrongdoing, this is an open investigation into a refund backlog, not a fraud verdict.
What does a lost term actually cost a student?
It’s easy to talk about strikes in the abstract, arrears, ultimatums, congresses. For a student at an affected university, the cost is concrete.
The most direct hit is time: every week a university stays shut pushes graduation back by roughly that same week, assuming the term is eventually made up rather than absorbed into a longer academic calendar. Multiply that by the kind of multi-month disruptions Nigerian students have lived through before, and a single strike can shift a graduation date by a full academic year, a pattern NANS (the National Association of Nigerian Students) has repeatedly pointed to in its own protests over the years.
There’s a financial dimension specific to this moment, too. Under NELFUND’s terms, which are interest-free repayment only begins two years after a graduate completes NYSC, with 10% of salary deducted by the employer once the graduate is in paid work; the loan is forgiven if the person still hasn’t found work five years after NYSC. A longer stay in school doesn’t change those terms, but it does push back the point at which a graduate starts earning, and therefore the point at which the two-year repayment clock has any income behind it to draw on. For a family that borrowed from relatives, or a student juggling both tuition and upkeep costs, a delayed term is a delayed return on money already spent.
Then there’s the less measurable cost: momentum. Final-year students lose defence and examination windows. Postgraduate researchers lose supervision time. And AAUA’s own ASUU chapter has separately warned that prolonged disruption risks pushing lecturers themselves to other institutions, a longer-term cost to teaching capacity that outlasts any single strike.
How do Nigerian institutions keep teaching through disruption?
This isn’t the first round of ASUU-related disruption Nigerian universities have had to navigate, and what’s worked, and what hasn’t, is reasonably well documented.
What’s been tried: During past extended closures, some departments and individual lecturers have run informal continuity efforts, WhatsApp groups for assignments and discussion, emailed reading lists, and in some cases recorded lectures shared informally. Some institutions have leaned on their existing learning management systems, where they had one, to keep coursework moving even when in-person teaching stopped.
What’s honestly failed, or fallen short: Ad hoc continuity efforts tend to be uneven, dependent on an individual lecturer’s initiative rather than institutional infrastructure, which means some courses get real continuity and others get none. And infrastructure realities in Nigeria are not uniform: data costs remain a genuine barrier for many students, especially outside major cities, and reliable power for extended device use is not guaranteed everywhere. Any continuity plan that assumes every student has consistent data and a laptop will fail some meaningful share of its own student body.
What that means practically: the institutions that have handled disruption best tend to combine more than one channel a structured platform for students who can reliably get online, alongside lower-bandwidth options like downloadable materials or scheduled call-in sessions for students who can’t. None of this replaces in-person teaching, and none of it is a substitute for the strike actually ending, it’s a way to limit how much ground students lose while it continues.
What continuity infrastructure looks like in practice
For an institution weighing how to keep a cohort moving through an indefinite closure, the practical question isn’t whether to adopt one single tool, it’s what a layered setup actually requires.
At the core of most structured continuity setups are three components: a way to deliver lecture content asynchronously (recorded lectures, structured notes, reading material a student can access on their own schedule), a way to run assessments remotely (computer-based testing, or CBT, infrastructure that can administer and grade exams without a physical hall), and a way to hold live sessions for the material that genuinely benefits from real-time interaction, like seminars or supervision meetings. Platforms built for this, African Intelligence’s ROS among them generally bundle some version of these three pieces into one system an institution can roll out to a whole faculty or cohort, rather than leaving each department to improvise its own solution.
The honest requirements are the same ones that apply to any digital option: students need a device and either data or downloaded access, CBT components need enough bandwidth stability to run an exam window without dropped connections, and live sessions work best for smaller groups rather than full lecture-hall sizes. None of this is a substitute for lecturers, and none of it ends a strike its only job is narrowing the gap between “no teaching happening” and “some structured learning continuing” while a dispute plays out.
For a registrar’s or VC’s office evaluating this kind of infrastructure ahead of the next disruption rather than during one, the practical next step is seeing it in action against your own institution’s numbers, cohort size, device access, connectivity patterns, rather than a generic pitch. Book a walkthrough of how African Intelligence keeps a cohort learning through a closure, and bring your own enrolment and connectivity data to make it a real fit test rather than a demo.
Frequently asked questions
Which universities are on strike in Nigeria right now?
As of September 9, 2026, confirmed branch-level strikes are active at Adekunle Ajasin University (AAUA, Ondo), Olusegun Agagu University of Science and Technology (OAUSTECH, Ondo), Plateau State University (PLASU, Bokkos), and Nnamdi Azikiwe University (NAU/UNIZIK, Anambra a separate salary dispute). Sule Lamido University (SLUK, Jigawa) has a two-week warning strike scheduled from September 15. This is branch-level action, not a nationwide ASUU strike.
How much has NELFUND disbursed?
As of August 8, 2026, NELFUND had disbursed ₦322.69 billion since its 2024 launch, across more than 1.6 million loan applications, roughly ₦192.89 billion in institutional fees to 319 institutions and ₦129.80 billion in student upkeep support, according to figures the agency has published.
A running story
We’ll refresh the strike-status table above weekly for as long as branch-level disputes continue, dating each update. If you’re planning around a specific institution’s status, check the “as of” date at the top of this article before you rely on anything below it, this is one of the fastest-moving stories in Nigerian education right now, and yesterday’s status can be wrong by the time you read this.
