By Barnabas Inumidun Akindele

Sixty years after the world agreed what teachers are owed, Nigeria still owes its teachers more than applause. It owes many of them their salaries.

Most of us can name one. The primary school teacher who held our small hands to shape the letters of the alphabet. The secondary school teacher who refused to give up on us when we had given up on mathematics. The lecturer who handed back a project covered in red ink and, in doing so, taught us that good work is rewritten work.

Today, 5 October, the world marks World Teachers’ Day. This year carries extra weight. On 5 October 1966, in Paris, the French capital, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) adopted the Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, the first international charter to spell out what teachers deserve: fair pay, proper training, decent working conditions and a real voice in education policy. That charter turns 60 today, and UNESCO has framed this year’s celebration as “Standing with teachers”, a call to protect the profession, raise its status and recognise its role in shaping our futures.

So, let me begin where gratitude belongs. To every teacher standing before 60 pupils in a classroom without a ceiling, a fan or enough chairs: thank you. To every lecturer who has kept teaching through power cuts, empty laboratories and delayed salaries, supervising theses and writing references for students who would go on to bigger things: thank you.
My own story is a debt to teachers. My primary school teachers at Jacob’s Model School, Sango Ota, Ogun State, and my secondary school teachers at Praise Land College, Ijoko, also in Ogun State, laid the foundation in reading, writing, and character on which everything else was built. Later, the lecturers who taught me English at Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State, showed me how words carry tone, persuade, and build trust. That is the raw material of the public relations work I do today. Every strategy I write, and every story I help a brand tell, carries a piece of what they gave me. Many Nigerians, in boardrooms, hospitals, newsrooms and parliaments, can say the same about their own teachers.

Applause without pay
But gratitude rings hollow when the people we honour cannot pay their rent.
Since August, lecturers in several state-owned universities have gone on indefinite strike, some over governments’ failure to implement the 2025 FGN-ASUU Agreement, others over months of unpaid salaries and promotion arrears stretching back years. In some federal universities, lecturers have withdrawn their services over incomplete monthly salaries. And just days before Teachers’ Day, academic and non-academic staff of yet another group of state universities began an indefinite strike over unmet agreements.
The irony is hard to miss. In January, the Federal Government unveiled the newly signed 2025 agreement and hailed it as “the death of strikes” in our institutions. Eight months later, ASUU’s National Executive Council, at an emergency meeting in September, warned that it could reactivate its suspended nationwide strike without further notice. The union cites haphazard implementation, unremitted deductions, and three and a half months of unpaid salaries whose real value has fallen by more than half since 2022 because of naira devaluation.
The picture is no better in our primary and secondary schools. Earlier this year, teachers’ unions in several states said their members were owed as much as four months’ salaries, alongside unpaid allowances and promotions delayed for years. In some places, primary school teachers went on strike over arrears. The Federal Government deserves credit for resuming payment of long-standing arrears to teachers in its own colleges in August, but some of those officers had waited nearly eight years.
At its national delegates’ conference last week, the NUT named poor remuneration, teacher shortages, underfunding and insecurity in schools among the biggest threats to the profession. Sixty years after the world wrote down what teachers are owed, many Nigerian teachers are still, quite literally, being owed.

More than a labour dispute
It is tempting to treat all this as a quarrel between unions and governments. It is not. Students are the collateral. The 2022 ASUU strike kept public universities shut for eight months, and pushed back the graduation of countless students by a year or more. Every shutdown pushes another bright young person to a private university abroad, or out of education entirely.
Quality suffers too. A teacher owed four months’ salary is a teacher running a side business, giving lessons after school or quietly applying for jobs overseas. We cannot ask for world-class learning outcomes from professionals we pay late, pay partially, or forget to pay at all. The brain drain of Nigerian lecturers is not a mystery. It is a pay slip.
As a communications practitioner, I also see a crisis of trust. A signed agreement that is not funded is a press release, not a policy. Each broken promise teaches unions that only strikes work, and teaches citizens to ignore government announcements. In my profession, we say reputation is the sum of promises kept. On education, governments at every level have a reputation problem that no slogan can fix.

A way forward
The solutions are not new, but they need political will and public pressure. Here is where I believe we should start.
1. Make teacher pay a first-line charge: Salaries should be ring-fenced before any other spending at federal, state and local government levels. Where primary school teachers are paid through local councils, often the weakest link, state governments must guarantee that pay arrives in full and on time.
2. Fund agreements before the signing ceremony: No government should sign an agreement it has not costed and budgeted for. Every deal with ASUU, the NUT, or any education union should come with an appropriation line and a release timetable, approved by the relevant legislature.
3. Publish the debt and a dated plan to clear it: Any government owing teachers should state publicly how much it owes, to whom, and by what dates it will pay. Quarterly progress reports to the National Assembly and state assemblies would turn vague assurances into commitments that can be checked.
4. Governors must own their universities: A state that establishes a university must fund it. ASUU itself acknowledges that several states have begun implementing the 2025 agreement, which proves it can be done. States that cannot fund the universities they have should not be opening new ones.
5. Build a permanent early-warning mechanism: A joint government-union implementation committee should meet regularly and publish its findings, so that disputes are settled at the first missed payment, not after a 14-day ultimatum. Unions, in turn, should keep strikes as a genuine last resort and lead with data.
6. Look beyond pay: The 1966 Recommendation speaks of status in its fullest sense: how society values teaching, the professional voice and support teachers enjoy, and their material conditions. That means continuous training, clear career paths, safe schools, and teachers at the table when education policy is made.
7. The rest of us have a role: Alumni associations, companies and philanthropists can fund scholarships, laboratories and teacher awards. But private goodwill must complement public funding, never replace it. Our loudest support is to keep demanding accountability on teachers’ behalf.

Sixty years ago, the world agreed that teachers deserve dignity, security and respect. To every teacher and lecturer who trained us: thank you. We owe you. It is time we paid.

Barnabas Inumidun Akindele is a public relations and brand communications strategist and an Associate Member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR).