By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
When teachers abandon their classrooms in protest, the consequences extend beyond the dispute between workers and government. Lessons are suspended, academic calendars disrupted and children lose instructional time that cannot always be recovered. Yet behind every teachers’ strike may lie grievances that deserve attention rather than dismissal.
That is the dilemma confronting the Federal Capital Territory, where the Nigeria Labour Congress commenced an indefinite strike on 7 October over teachers’ promotions, career progression and administrative decisions affecting education personnel.
The confrontation escalated when FCT Minister Nyesom Wike directed the six area council chairmen to enforce no work, no pay against participating workers. He described the action as politically motivated and maintained that legitimate demands were being addressed. Labour disagrees.
At the centre of the dispute is a requirement that teachers can only be promoted when vacancies exist. The NLC argues that qualified teachers have consequently suffered prolonged career stagnation despite meeting advancement requirements. It also seeks reconsideration of teachers excluded from the 2025 promotion examinations and reversal of certain redeployments and demotions.
These are serious concerns. Career progression affects morale, professional dignity and commitment to public education. But government’s position also warrants examination. Promotions have implications for staffing structures, budgets and public service rules. The question is whether the existing framework fairly recognises professional growth or traps qualified teachers in positions they have outgrown.
A teacher may acquire additional qualifications, develop competence and accumulate valuable classroom experience without a senior administrative vacancy arising. Should such development count for nothing until somebody retires or resigns? The FCT Administration owes teachers a convincing answer.
There is, however, disagreement within organised labour. The FCT Trade Union Congress and the Academic Staff Union of Secondary Schools have reportedly distanced themselves from the strike, questioning the consultation preceding it and warning about its consequences. Their reservations complicate any suggestion that all affected workers speak with one voice.
Industrial action is a legitimate bargaining instrument, but it carries responsibilities. Union leaders should demonstrate that negotiations have been meaningfully pursued, their demands clearly defined and their mandate properly established. Equally, government should not dismiss employment grievances merely by questioning labour leaders’ political motivations.
Wike has alleged that FCT NLC chairman Knabayi Adalo is pursuing a political agenda. Adalo disputes that characterisation and maintains that teachers have endured prolonged stagnation. Even if political motives were established, they would not automatically invalidate genuine employment concerns.
The proper response is evidence. How many teachers qualify for promotion but remain stagnant? How many vacancies exist? Which agreements have been implemented, and which remain outstanding? What financial or administrative constraints prevent resolution? Both sides should place verifiable answers before the public.
The no work, no pay directive introduces a legal dimension. Government may invoke applicable rules concerning remuneration during strikes, while workers retain rights associated with lawful collective action, subject to statutory requirements. Whether deductions are lawful in these circumstances should be assessed against the law, not political rhetoric.
But there is a third party whose interests risk disappearing beneath the confrontation: the child.
Children neither negotiate promotions nor determine employment policy. Yet when classrooms close, they suffer consequences without any influence over the dispute. Examination candidates lose preparation time. Children from disadvantaged households may have no access to private lessons or digital alternatives. Repeated disruptions can therefore deepen educational inequality.
The right to education must remain central to the debate. It would be unfair to demand that teachers endure indefinite injustice simply because their work is indispensable. A demoralised workforce ultimately damages educational quality. But it is equally troubling when unresolved employment disagreements repeatedly interrupt children’s learning.
The solution lies neither in humiliating teachers nor in treating classrooms as permanent bargaining instruments.
The FCT Administration and labour representatives should establish a transparent, time bound mechanism to review the promotion policy, identify outstanding entitlements and resolve contested administrative decisions. Where negotiations have failed, independent mediation deserves consideration. Any settlement should include a credible plan to recover lost instructional time.
Beyond this dispute, Abuja should examine whether education sector employment conflicts require a standing resolution framework capable of intervening before disagreements escalate into school closures. Prevention is preferable to emergency negotiations after pupils have already lost weeks of learning.
Nigeria frequently promises improved educational standards and a more competitive workforce. Such ambitions require fair career structures, accountable administration and consistent classroom teaching. The present confrontation offers an opportunity to address all three.
Wike and organised labour may disagree about who caused the strike, and each may consider its position justified. But neither can transfer responsibility for resolving the dispute to children sitting at home.
When government and teachers fight over the conditions of teaching, both must remember the purpose of teaching.
Whatever the eventual outcome, Abuja’s schoolchildren should not be made to pay the price of a dispute they did not create.
Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645

Why capable people underperform inside incapable systems

By Dr. Omolaraeni Olaosebikan

There is a peculiar thing that happens to some Nigerians when they leave Nigeria. The employee once described as difficult suddenly becomes a star performer. The young professional told to “calm down” for asking too many questions becomes valued for initiative. The doctor, engineer, researcher or technologist who struggled to make an impact inside one system begins to flourish inside another.
We usually call it brain drain. Perhaps we should also ask what the brain was draining from. Nigeria unquestionably has a skills problem, but we have spent so much time asking whether our people are sufficiently skilled that we have paid too little attention to an equally uncomfortable question: what happens to capable people after we put them inside our institutions?

The skills deficit is real. A 2025 report cited by the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund found that 65 per cent of Nigerian employers regard skills gaps as a major barrier to organisational transformation. Employers are also searching for capabilities in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data, systems thinking and customer service. Nigeria therefore cannot pretend that every struggling employee is simply a misunderstood genius. Our education-to-employment pipeline needs serious repair.

But that is only half the diagnosis. A country can suffer a shortage of particular skills and simultaneously waste a disturbing amount of the talent it already possesses. Those realities are not contradictory.
Consider the labour market itself. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that informal employment accounted for 93 per cent of employment in the second quarter of 2024, while time-related underemployment stood at 9.2 per cent. The official unemployment rate was 4.3 per cent. The figures remind us that the question is no longer simply whether Nigerians are working. It is what kind of work they are doing, under what conditions, and how productively their abilities are being used.
Employment is not the same thing as productivity. Possessing talent is not the same thing as creating an environment in which talent can perform.

Put a highly capable person inside a system where approvals take weeks, initiative threatens hierarchy, technology is inadequate, promotion bears little relationship to merit, mistakes are punished more severely than inertia, and the safest career strategy is to agree with the most senior person in the room. Eventually, something predictable happens: the employee adapts.

Curiosity becomes caution. Initiative becomes compliance. Ideas become things discussed privately after meetings rather than offered during them. The organisation then looks at the diminished version of the employee it helped to create and concludes: our people are simply not good enough.
The cost goes far beyond individual frustration. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index Plus now looks not only at health and education but also at how skills develop during working life. For Nigeria, its 2025 assessment places the education pillar at 64, below the lower-middle-income-country median of 88. It estimates that increasing effective schooling to 12 years could raise labour earnings by about 20 per cent over the long term.

The important point is that human capital does not stop developing on graduation day. The workplace can sharpen ability, stretch it and reward it. It can also slowly diminish it.
That should make employers reconsider the fashionable complaint that “young people don’t want to work.” Some do not. Every generation has its share of entitlement, indiscipline and mediocrity. But leadership becomes lazy when anecdotes become a diagnosis of an entire generation.

Before declaring that talent has disappeared, organisations should examine what they reward. Do we reward the person who solves the problem, or the person who never challenges the boss? Do we promote competence or proximity? Can an employee respectfully disagree without being branded arrogant? When somebody brings a new idea, is the first instinct “How could this work?” or “Who authorised you?”
These questions are becoming more urgent because Nigeria is not operating in a closed labour market. The World Bank says about 3.5 million people enter Nigeria’s labour force every year. Weak creation of quality jobs, limited entrepreneurial opportunities and rising emigration make the challenge even sharper.
Our demographic advantage will therefore not become an economic dividend merely because Nigeria has millions of young people. Population becomes productive capital only when ability meets opportunity, tools, accountability and competent leadership.

This is also where the japa conversation deserves greater honesty. Salary matters. Security matters. Infrastructure and quality of life matter. But people also migrate towards systems: systems in which equipment works, processes are clearer, expertise carries weight, professional effort can produce an outcome and performance has a reasonable chance of being recognised.
When trained people repeatedly conclude that their abilities can create greater value elsewhere, retention cannot be solved entirely with patriotic appeals. Sometimes the problem is not simply that another country pays more. It is that another system allows the person to do more.

The private sector should resist reading this as criticism meant only for government. Dysfunction has no exclusive address. A beautifully branded company can still have a culture where information is hoarded, managers are insecure, meetings replace decisions and talented employees spend more energy navigating personalities than solving problems.
None of this absolves the Nigerian professional of responsibility. Talent without discipline is potential wasted. Qualifications without continuous learning expire quickly. The future workplace will increasingly reward adaptability, digital fluency, critical thinking, communication and the ability to learn faster than a job description changes.

Accountability must therefore run in both directions. Employees must keep developing themselves. Organisations must stop demanding world-class performance while preserving systems that punish world-class behaviour.
Nigeria needs to broaden the question. Yes, how do we produce better talent?

But also: how do we stop wasting the talent we produce? Our schools must improve. Businesses must train. Young professionals must keep learning. Yet organisations must also build cultures in which merit can breathe, managers lead rather than merely supervise, technology enables rather than frustrates, and intelligent disagreement is not mistaken for insubordination.

Perhaps, then, the Nigerian who suddenly excels abroad has not acquired an entirely new brain at Heathrow, Toronto Pearson or JFK. Sometimes what has changed is the ecosystem around that brain: the tools, expectations, incentives, consequences, processes and permission to perform.

That does not mean every Nigerian system fails or every foreign one succeeds. It means that before we conclude that our greatest problem is a shortage of capable people, we should examine the machinery into which we place them. A nation cannot complain indefinitely about losing its best minds while refusing to interrogate the conditions under which those minds are expected to work.

The story we tell about talent determines where we look for the solution. Blame the people, and we keep searching for better people. Examine the system as well, and we begin building places where good people can become exceptional. Nigeria needs both better-prepared talent and institutions capable of using that talent well and this is why the narrative matters.

Dr. Omolaraeni Olaosebikan
Strategic Communications & Reputation Management Expert | Founder, The Narrative Matters®

By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D

They were not travelling for holidays. They were not adventurers ignoring security warnings. They were young Nigerian graduates answering a call from their country.

Their destination was the National Youth Service Corps orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom States. Their journey began in Ibadan. But somewhere around Umunoha on the Owerri–Onitsha Road in Imo State, gunmen intercepted the two buses carrying them and marched several of the prospective corps members into the bush.

Today, their families are living every parent’s nightmare. Reports indicate that the kidnappers demanded ₦50 million for each victim. Even the precise number still being held has become contested. Some reports put it at 19, while parents insist 20 remain in captivity and dispute official accounts that some passengers were rescued, saying they escaped during the attack.

Meanwhile, police say drones have helped locate the suspected kidnappers’ camp, but intelligence suggesting that the area may have been planted with improvised explosive devices has complicated rescue efforts.

Beyond the immediate and overriding concern of bringing these young Nigerians home safely lies a question Nigeria can no longer avoid:

What duty does the state owe young citizens whom it compels to serve it?

The NYSC was established in 1973 in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Nigeria desperately needed institutions capable of rebuilding national cohesion. Its philosophy remains admirable. Young graduates should encounter Nigerians beyond the boundaries of ethnicity, religion and geography. The scheme seeks to develop common ties, remove prejudices and promote national unity and integration.

Indeed, its governing framework provides that, as far as possible, young Nigerians should be assigned to states other than their states of origin.

That is precisely what gives today’s security question its urgency.

Nigeria cannot build a compulsory system around sending young people beyond familiar environments and then treat the dangers involved in reaching those destinations as entirely their private responsibility.

This is not the first warning. In August 2023, eight prospective corps members travelling from Akwa Ibom to begin national service in Sokoto were abducted along the Funtua–Gusau Road in Zamfara State. Their ordeal dragged on for months. The final victim was not rescued until August 2024.

Now another group of young graduates travelling to answer the same national call has been abducted. At some point, recurrence must become policy evidence.

This is why the argument should not be reduced to whether NYSC should be scrapped. Following the latest abduction, activist and politician Omoyele Sowore called for the immediate suspension and eventual abolition of the scheme. He argues that government cannot compel young Nigerians to serve across the country when it cannot guarantee their safety.

That position deserves debate. But insecurity should not automatically be allowed to destroy one of Nigeria’s longest surviving instruments of national integration.

The better question is whether the NYSC model has sufficiently adapted to the Nigeria of today.

The Nigeria into which NYSC was born in 1973 is not the Nigeria through which corps members travel in 2026. Kidnapping for ransom, banditry, terrorism and violent criminal networks have transformed the security environment across significant parts of the country.

Public policy must respond to changed reality.

NYSC already advises prospective and serving corps members against travelling at night. That is sensible, but advice cannot substitute for a comprehensive duty of care.

If government requires graduates to report to orientation camps across the federation, why should there not be designated and protected transportation arrangements from regional departure points during mobilisation periods? Why should deployment decisions not incorporate constantly updated security risk assessments? Why should prospective corps members be left individually to navigate routes that security agencies themselves may consider dangerous?

There should also be clear protocols determining when postings to particular areas must be suspended, relocated or made optional because security conditions have deteriorated.

And where credible danger exists, requesting redeployment should not require a young Nigerian to prove that he or she is married or medically vulnerable before safety becomes relevant.

The state cannot eliminate every risk. No government can guarantee that no citizen will ever encounter crime. Corps members are also adults with responsibilities for their personal safety.

But compulsory service changes the equation. When the state requires a citizen to undertake an activity, directs where that citizen should report and makes completion of that service consequential to the graduate’s future, the state assumes a heightened responsibility to anticipate reasonably foreseeable risks and mitigate them.

Patriotism must carry reciprocal obligations. Nigeria asks these young people to leave their homes, cross cultural and geographical boundaries, live among strangers and devote a year to national service. In return, they are entitled to more than khaki uniforms, orientation drills and monthly allowances. They are entitled to a system designed around their safety.

That does not diminish the ideal of NYSC. It may be necessary to save it.

For more than five decades, the scheme has brought Nigerians together in ways few other national institutions have managed. Friendships have been formed, marriages have begun, prejudices have been challenged and young Nigerians have discovered parts of their country they might otherwise never have known.

Those achievements are worth preserving. But preserving NYSC cannot mean preserving it unchanged.

The young Nigerians now held somewhere in the forests of Imo State did not create Nigeria’s insecurity. They should not become collateral damage of a national programme that has failed to adapt adequately to it.

The immediate responsibility is clear: every lawful effort must be made to bring them home safely.

Afterwards must come the harder conversation. Not simply whether Nigeria should retain or abolish NYSC, but whether compulsory national service in an age of widespread insecurity requires an entirely new architecture of protection. Because if the state insists that its young citizens have a duty to serve their country, one obligation must be equally non-negotiable.

The country has a duty to protect those who serve it.

Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645