On Wednesday, 13 August 2025, Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved a seven-year moratorium on establishing new federal universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. In the same breath, it cleared nine long-pending private universities to open. The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, framed the pause as a quality-first reset: too many under-subscribed campuses, too few resources, and an eroding reputation for graduates. Yet, the “freeze” plus “fast-track” optics have left the public wondering. Is this reform or contradiction? The policy can be former if Nigeria uses the pause to solve the right problems, measures progress with real indicators, and aligns expansion with demand and quality.
Dr. Alausa’s case for the moratorium leaned on a stark diagnosis. In too many places, we have buildings without students and payrolls without classrooms. He cited federal universities with fewer than 2,000 students, one northern university with about 1,200 staff serving fewer than 800 students, and shockingly low applicant interest in hundreds of institutions through the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). If those numbers sound extreme, it is because they are but they track what independent reporting surfaced recently – under-enrolment and inefficiency are real and widespread.
What are the major strengths of the moratorium? A simple answer is: Fix what we have before we build more. It targets the right bottleneck – quality, not access headcount. For a decade, the reflex to announce “one more university” became a political substitute for the harder work of fixing laboratories, recruiting PhD-level faculty, updating curricula, and accrediting programmes that actually match labour-market demand. A pause forces attention and hopefully and resources onto the hard bits – infrastructure rehabilitation, research equipment, student housing, digital learning environments, and faculty development. The minister’s language is right. Capacity and efficiency must climb before headcounts do.
Secondly, it challenges the fiscal illusion of expansion. New federal campuses create recurrent liabilities – salaries, pensions, utilities, hostels – long after the ribbon is cut. Consolidating spend within existing institutions can yield bigger student and research payoffs per naira. In a tight fiscal climate, plugging leaks matters more than launching new taps. (The FEC’s approval of private universities does not add to the federal wage bill.) Thirdly, the moratorium elevates standards for private provision. The Hon Minister described clearing 9 of 79 active private applications after stricter screening, that is, pruning 350 dormant files and raising the bar at NUC. That is exactly how to protect students and parents – fewer, stronger approvals beat many weak ones.
Fourthly, it opens space for rationalization With the pause in place, government can merge micro-departments, convert chronically under-subscribed campuses to specialisations aligned with regional strengths (e.g., agriculture, mining, logistics, blue economy), and re-balance the university–polytechnic–college of education mix. The aim is to achieve fewer “everything schools,” more centres of excellence. Nigeria currently has dozens of federal institutions. Figures quoted on the NUC website put federal universities at 72; state universities (67), private universities (159), totaling 298. Therefore, rationalisation is not a theoretical concept.
The major points on the flipside of the argument speak to weaknesses and risks associated with freezing the wrong thing and sending the wrong signal. Firstly, the optics seem muddled. “Ban new universities!” and “Approve nine universities!” in the same briefing is a messaging own-goal. Contextually speaking, that the nine are private, long-evaluated, and not treasury-funded got lost in headlines. Policy clarity matters, which explains why the ministry may wish to publish a one-pager that spells out what is paused (federal), what continues (properly vetted private), and what success will look like in two, five, and seven years.
Secondly, the moratorium could be misread as an access freeze when Nigeria already lags Africa’s leaders. By far the strongest critique of the moratorium is simple. Nigeria’s tertiary Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), that is, the share of young people in higher education, is low for a country of over 230 million people. The latest World Bank/UNESCO-based figure for Nigeria is about 11.8% (2018), well below South Africa (27.17% in 2022), Egypt (37.8% in 2023), Morocco (47.71% in 2023), and Algeria (53.4% in 2023). Even Ghana and Kenya sit around the 20% mark, ahead of Nigeria on recent data. Freezing federal expansion is defensible only if the state simultaneously expands quality places (including distance and open learning) fast enough to lift participation.
Thirdly, without measurable targets, “quality first” becomes a slogan. If the moratorium does not come with visible gains – more accredited programmes, higher completion rates, labs that work, more PhD-qualified lecturers, stronger research output – public support will evaporate. Quality must be defined, base-lined, and publicly tracked. Fourthly, it may unintentionally starve polytechnics and colleges of education. Nigeria’s skills gap is acute. Employers need technicians, nurses, educators, and technologists as badly as coders and lawyers. The moratorium covers federal polytechnics and colleges of education too; unless accompanied by a separate “TVET & teaching force upgrade plan,” Nigeria risk deepening shortages in the very skills that power growth.
Another sticky aspect of the pause is about what the numbers say about demand, supply and mismatch, population and baseline capacity. Nigeria’s population is now above 232 million (2024 World Bank estimate). For such a massive youth cohort, the Nigerian tertiary education system grossly under-serves. That is not opinion; it is arithmetic. Even if every existing campus ran at full, efficient capacity tomorrow, GER would remain low unless we lift throughput across all pathways – universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, and high-quality online/open routes.
JAMB data remind us of a paradox: huge applicant pools, modest admission rates – and at the same time, campuses that cannot fill seats in certain programmes. In 2017 and 2018, only about a third of applicants secured admission (≈33% each year on official NBS-compiled JAMB statistics). In 2024, roughly 1.98 million candidates sat UTME, an indicator that demand is not the problem. Yet, many institutions record negligible applications and some programmes enroll in double digits. This is a mismatch problem: location, reputation, programme relevance, and cost drive choices; students flock to a sub-set of institutions and courses while others go begging. That is exactly the kind of inefficiency the moratorium aims to fix.
The GER gap with peers is wide. A selection of the latest available GER figures underscores the challenge: Nigeria: ~11.8% (2018), South Africa: 27.17% (2022), Egypt: ~37.8% (2023), Morocco: 47.71% (2023), Algeria: ~53.4% (2023), Ghana: ~20.4% (2023), Kenya: ~20.5% (latest World Bank series), Senegal: ~16–17% (2023), Angola: ~9.9% (2023; World Bank via CEIC), DRC: ~6.7% (2020), Uganda: ~4.6% (2014; latest widely cited WB series), Tanzania: ~5.4% (2022 global ranking snapshot). Two cautions here in order; data years differ because some countries report more recently than others; GER is a participation ratio, not a quality metric. Still, the picture is unmistakable: Nigeria trails the continent’s big systems and even some smaller peers.
Given the foregoing background, does the moratorium signify progress or setback? On balance, the moratorium can be progress if three conditions are met. Government publishes a time-bound “quality compact” with annual targets, budgets, and independent verification. Admissions and programme mix are rebalanced so students apply where capacity exists and programmes match skills demand. Expansion continues via non-federal routes that do not dilute quality: strengthened Open and Distance Learning (ODL), industry-backed polytechnics, short-cycle tertiary pathways, and credible private provision under tougher rules.
It becomes a setback if, seven years from now, GER barely moves, labs still don’t work, and staffing remains thin outside a handful of flagships. Freezing ribbon-cuttings is easy; lifting learning outcomes is hard. Given this backdrop, let us then pause and consider a practical bullet-point roadmap that spells out what to do during the seven-year pause. Publish a “State of Tertiary Quality” baseline within 90 days. Tie money to measures; introduce performance compacts with each federal institution with specific emphasis on access & equity, quality, relevance, and efficiency. Fix admissions where the students are. Professionalise staffing. Modernise the polytechnic and teacher-education tracks. Tech-enable the learning stack. Protect students and parents by publishing Consumer Guide to Tertiary Education. Make research count. Create Challenge Grants for Nigeria-specific problems – food security, public health, urban transport, fintech for SMEs, climate adaptation. Communicate by issuing a yearly Tertiary Scorecard to FEC and Nigerians – what improved, where money went, what still lags.
Beyond this roadmap, perhaps the biggest elephant in the room that constitutes a formidable cog in the wheel of Nigeria’s tertiary education system reform is the current lecturers’ abysmal salary structure. Surely, no reform no matter how well-intentioned will yield the desired results at the long run unless the fundamental crisis of lecturer remuneration is addressed. The immediate past president of ASUU, Prof Emmanuel Osodeke, as reported by Daily Time Nigeria (3 November 2024) ‘revealed that Nigerian university lecturers and professors are the lowest paid in the world.’ In his words, “I don’t know of any country in Africa, be it South, North, Central and even West, where university lecturers earn as low as Nigerian counterparts…No lecturer in some of of those African countries earn less than $2,000 (about N3.3 million) per month and those in professorship cadre earn up to $10,000 (N16,5 million) per month. But here, in Nigeria, a professor is earning $300 (N495,000) per month…”
History tells us that it has not always been this way. In the 1960s, professors ranked just below the Prime Minister and Supreme Court judges in Nigeria’s salary structure. They were respected, well-compensated, and motivated. Today, the very custodians of knowledge cannot afford decent housing, quality healthcare, or good schools for their children. It gets worse when politics becomes more lucrative than academia. A telling moment came early 2024 when Peter Obi, during campaigning for Labour Party candidate Dennis Agbo, met a longtime schoolmate turned professor in Nsukka. The professor, once a first-class graduate and now a seasoned academic, broke down narrating how his annual salary of ₦400,000 in 2010 still holds today, while inflation and naira devaluation erased its value drastically. The poignant sting that rang out depressingly was his candid plea: “Help me get appointed as the Personal Assistant (PA) to the Honourable if he wins—I’ll earn more there than as a professor.” Obi’s heartfelt post on X (formerly Twitter) captured the tragedy of that moment: a professor, the nation’s intellectual asset, contemplating a political aide role for survival.
Truly, the verdict is quite frightening. A Daily Trust headline of 18 August 2025 put it even more bluntly: the combined monthly pay of Nigeria’s 109 senators could pay the salaries of 4,708 professors. In stark terms, the pay package of one senator can cover the salaries of at least 43 senior professors. In a country that endlessly chants the mantra of “knowledge economy” while its best brains live like paupers, such figures are not just alarming, they are obscene. The consequences are already playing out. From Prof. Nasir Hassan-Wagini of Umaru Musa Yar’adua University, who was seen selling vegetables in Batsari market, to countless academics doubling as taxi drivers, petty traders, and “adjunct hustlers” across multiple universities, Nigeria’s professors are surviving, not thriving.
The testimonies are shockingly heartbreaking. If it is not Prof. Balarabe Abdullahi of ABU Zaria lamenting that his salary cannot pay for standard schooling in Abuja; or professors breaking down in tears because they cannot feed their families; it is crowd-funding campaigns to pay medical bills of senior academics, some of whom died despite donations. What message does this send to young Nigerians? While speaking as guest lecturer at The PUNCH Forum, themed: “Innovative Funding of Functional Education in the Digital Age,” the immediate past Vice-Chancellor of UNILAG, Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe disclosed that no fewer than 239 first-class graduates of the University of Lagos, employed as lecturers, left the institution within seven years, attributing the mass exodus to poor remuneration, unconducive working conditions, and low motivation among lecturers.
The former VC stated it more starkly: “The lecturers are tired, the morale is low, and lecturers are poorly paid. Academic staff members are on the edge, itching to leave. The standard of teaching is going down. As Vice Chancellor, I earned N900, 000 as salary. My present salary as a professor, still in the system, is N700, 000. My son saw my pay slip and described it as a joke. Do you know that some lecturers sleep in the office?” It is less-surprising that lecturers, who should be mentoring, researching, and publishing are instead chasing side jobs just to feed their families. In February 2024, ASUU disclosed that 46 lecturers in its Abuja Zone alone had died from economic hardship and work-related stress. Others, unable to cope, are leaving the country in droves for better-paying positions abroad. This has created a brain drain–brain overload paradox: while skilled academics leave, those who remain face crushing workloads, supervising hundreds of students with little institutional support. Teaching quality is deteriorating, mentoring has virtually collapsed, and research output – already poor – is stagnating further.
The bottom line of all this is that freezing the establishment of new universities would be of little significance if existing ones remain “intellectual graveyards” where lecturers are demoralised, laboratories are obsolete, and libraries lack current journals. The danger is that the moratorium policy, however well-intentioned, will achieve little if government does not balance structural expansion with investment in human capital. Put differently, the seven-year moratorium is defensible as a consolidation strategy, and the nine private approvals are not the hypocrisy they first appear to be. But a freeze cannot conjure quality out of thin air. Quality lives or dies with the people who teach and research. Until Nigeria fixes the pay, tools and trust it offers its lecturers, we will keep graduating frustration – no matter how many inaugurations we postpone. The freeze will succeed only to the extent as a Band-Aid on a festering wound if the real crisis – the systematic devaluation of the academic profession – is not tackled frontally, head-on, and holistically.
The fact is simple. Treat the moratorium as what it must be: a bridge to a better-funded, better-governed, more motivating university system. Cross that bridge with a hard-nosed programme reform – serious remuneration reset, immediate full implementation of 2009 FG-ASUU agreement, targeted staffing, intentional funding – and the Nigerian tertiary education system will have something worth preserving when the freeze thaws in 2032. Failure to do so will amount to tumbling and stumbling off the far side into the same swamp the system started from. Can Nigeria afford this policy cul-de-sac? The answer hardly blows in the wind.
. Agbedo, a Professor of Linguistics, University of Nigeria, is a fellow of Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, and Public Affairs Analyst.
