ASUU: When Arrears Arrive Too Late – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

When salary arrears arrive too late, they function little as relief or reprieve. They arrive as shock, as irony, as a reminder of what was withheld while lives were being lived in hope that something good would come around. Money paid years after it was earned cannot restore health postponed, children withdrawn from school, or dignity eroded by waiting. It appears as relief only to those who mistake numbers for value.

Christopher Okigbo, as the poet, Maxim Uzoatu reminded recently in a Facebook post, once captured this entire tragedy of delay in four spare lines that sit quietly in Limits, almost casual, almost comic, until their full weight lands: “Kepkanly,/ who died of excess joy/when he received arrears of salary/awarded by the Harragin Commission of 1945”. Nothing more needs to be added to Okigbo’s poetic renderings, which capture the fact that Kepkanly did not die of hunger, or of punishment, or of visible violence.

He died of joy. A joy so belated, so unnatural, so violently postponed that his body couldn’t absorb it. The colonial bureaucracy that inflicted misery corrected itself at last, and in a manner that the correction became fatal. What Okigbo meant is that justice only arrived after life had already been ruined by waiting, and by turning the expected and the hoped for into a final injury rather than repair.

Late October 2025 brought announcements from the new Federal Government of Nigeria that N2.3 billion had been released to settle outstanding salary and promotion arrears owed to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other university unions. The payment, described as clearing Batch 8 arrears through the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, was presented as progress, proof of goodwill, and evidence of reforms. Public statements urged celebration. Editorials hinted at gratitude. Social media carried muted rejoicings. The system, as it has often done, congratulated itself for doing late what should never have been delayed while Kepkanly stood behind the applause, watching carefully.

For many Nigerian workers, arrears carry a peculiar cruelty. They look like money but behave like memory. They arrive swollen with numbers, stripped of time. They carry no compensation for lost years, for deferred lives, for postponed medical care, for children withdrawn from school, and for dignity eroded. They appear as bulk figures, yet they cannot reassemble the slow violence that preceded them. This is the essence of money illusion. Economists use the term to describe a common error of perception in which people confuse nominal amounts with real value. They see numbers and forget purchasing power. They celebrate wage increases that inflation has already destroyed.

They applaud lump sums that arrive after the market has moved on. Money illusion flatters governments and deceives workers. It pretends that arithmetic can heal time.
In Nigeria, money illusion has been elevated into a doctrine. N2.3 billion, when announced, sounded impressive. But when it is spread across multiple unions, institutions, ranks, and years, its meaning thins quickly. Spread across an economy battered by inflation, currency depreciation, energy costs, housing scarcity, and healthcare collapse, its purchasing power shrinks further. What appears as settlement on paper often arrives as partial repair in reality. For academic staff, promotion arrears mean something specific. Promotions often follow years of unpaid labor.

Research funded personally. Conferences attended at personal cost. Teaching loads expanded without compensation. Supervisory burdens increased without recognition. When promotion finally comes, the arrears gesture toward acknowledgment, but the delay ensures that the acknowledgment arrives in a diminished currency. The body remembers what the balance sheet forgets.

Nigeria has been here before. The Udoji Award of 1974 stands as the most famous national episode of collective salary adjustment. Born out of the recommendations of the Public Service Review Commission chaired by Chief Jerome Udoji, the award sought to rationalise wages, modernise administration, and restore morale in the civil service.

When payments began, celebration followed. Civil servants experienced sudden increases. Consumption surged. Optimism flourished and evaporated as inflation followed like a shadow. Prices rose sharply. Purchasing power diminished. The initial joy dissolved into longer hardship. What was meant as reform became a cautionary tale. Economists later identified the episode as a textbook demonstration of money illusion. Nominal wages rose and real welfare declined. The joy was immediate. The damage was slow. Kepkanly would have recognised the pattern of things.

What Okigbo grasped, long before the jargon, was that delayed justice alters the vitality of society. Workers forced to wait indefinitely for what they are owed do not simply lose income. They lose time, health, patience, and trust. By the time relief arrives, even generous relief, the cost has already been paid elsewhere. In funerals. In untreated illnesses. In early retirements. In intellectual exhaustion. In lives quietly shortened. But money does not travel backward. It cannot repair the months when salaries were paid in fragments. It cannot recover the years when promotions existed only on paper. It cannot resurrect colleagues who died waiting. The doctrine of money illusion encourages governments to speak in numbers while workers live with above the inflation prices. Rent does not negotiate with arrears. School fees do not accept retrospective explanations. Hospitals do not discount treatment because payment was once delayed. Inflation does not pause out of sympathy for union agreements.

Okigbo’s Kepkanly teaches that joy itself can become lethal when justice arrives too late and too abruptly. Contemporary Nigeria shows a harsher lesson. Workers are not diminished only by excessive joy. They are diminished by the steady erosion of purchasing power, by the quiet violence of inflation, by the cumulative toll of waiting, and by the deaths that follow long before celebration becomes possible. A government serious about reform would abandon the comedy of arrears. It would prioritise timely payment over dramatic settlements. It would measure success not in billions released but in stability preserved.

It would recognise that welfare delayed becomes welfare denied, regardless of eventual arithmetic.
Kepkanly did not need more money. He needed justice when it mattered. Nigerian workers still do.