Thank You No Be Salary: Teacher No Fit Teach on Empty Stomach!
Every October 5, we celebrate Teachers’ Day. We thank teachers for their patience. We thank them for their sacrifice. We praise them for shaping the next generation. But after all the speeches and social media posts, there is a simple question we should ask: Why does a society that depends on education continually reproduce the conditions that make education difficult to provide?
Teachers and lecturers are workers. They sell their labour for a wage, just like other workers. Because thank you no be salary. They have rent to pay, food to buy, children to raise and bills to settle. Teaching may be a profession built around knowledge and social responsibility, but that does not make teachers immune to the material conditions everyone else faces.
Yet Nigerian teachers and lecturers are constantly expected to sacrifice.
When they demand better pay, they are told to remember the importance of their profession. When they strike, they are blamed for disrupting students’ education. When they complain about poor working conditions, they are told to be patient. But how teacher go take remain patient? Teacher no fit teach on empty stomach!
In Nigeria today, most public school teachers earn between ₦70,000 and ₦150,000 a month, and private school teachers often far less, with no minimum salary enforced at all. Yet even the national minimum wage of ₦70,000 is withheld. In March this year, the Nigeria Union of Teachers was still complaining that some states had not implemented it. Last year, NUT data named Abia, Adamawa, Ebonyi, Enugu, Gombe, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Yobe and Zamfara as defaulters. FCT teachers had only just ended a months-long strike over unpaid salaries, and some primary school teachers in Yobe said they had received neither the old ₦30,000 minimum wage nor the new one.
But even if they are paid this miserly sum, inflation is taking it away. Prices rose 15.39% in the year to August 2026, and food prices 19.57%. The government boasts that inflation has fallen, but a falling rate only means prices are climbing more slowly, and food is climbing fastest. ₦70,000 now buys the food that about ₦58,500 bought last August. A teacher on ₦100,000 loses about ₦16,400 a month at the market, and a Senior Lecturer on ₦400,000 loses more than ₦65,000.
Millions of Children Outside the Classroom
The same system that leaves teachers hungry leaves millions of children with no teacher at all. UNICEF counts 10.5 million primary school-age children out of school, 60% of them girls, and in Kebbi 64.8% of primary-age children are out of school. Bandits and terrorists add to the toll: at least 1,683 learners were kidnapped and 184 killed between 2014 and 2022.
Faced with this out-of-school pandemic, the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, has chosen to dispute the count, insisting a full census will find seven to eight million. Even on his own figure, his government presides over millions of children without schooling. These are the children of poor workers and peasants, while the children of the ruling class sit in private schools in Abuja, Lagos and abroad.
When Teachers Say Enough Is Enough
The recent struggles in our universities show the problem of capitalism clearly. In September 2026, ASUU again threatened nationwide industrial action over unpaid salaries, unremitted deductions and the poor implementation of the agreement reached with the Federal Government in 2025. At the University of Port Harcourt, ASUU declared an indefinite strike after lecturers complained about incomplete salary payments and unpaid allowances. At UNIZIK, lecturers withdrew their services over unpaid August salaries before returning after the money was paid.
This is not new. The 2022 ASUU strike lasted roughly eight months. Students lost months of learning. Academic calendars were disrupted. Graduations were delayed. Families spent more money keeping students in school for longer.
And then we are told that strikes are the problem.
No! The strikes are a symptom of the broader system of capitalism in Nigeria.
When a government signs agreements with workers and then fails to properly implement them, when salaries and allowances remain unpaid, when universities remain underfunded and lecturers are forced to repeatedly fight for what they are rightfully owed, industrial action is the predictable result.
We should absolutely care about the disruption strikes cause to students. But we should also ask why workers are repeatedly pushed to the point where withdrawing their labour becomes their only effective weapon.
After years of negotiations, ASUU described the gains of its eight-year negotiation process as “modest.” The same cycle then continues: prolonged negotiations, partial concessions, unresolved agreements, and another crisis waiting around the corner!
This is the danger of a union leadership that becomes too comfortable with negotiation and containment. Even the NUT national president went further and declared in March 2026 that “Tinubu’s government is really trying for teachers,” in the same breath as admitting that states were still refusing to pay the minimum wage. A union leadership that praises the government while its members go unpaid has made its peace with containment.
Rank-and-file teachers and lecturers have every right to fight, and they deserve leaders who fight with them! A union should not merely bargain over how much of workers’ demands the government is willing to concede. It should help workers understand and challenge the system that continually produces those demands in the first place.
Our criticism cannot therefore be directed at lecturers fighting for their livelihoods. The question is what kind of organisation can turn those struggles into something bigger?
Teachers’ Struggles Are Working-Class Struggles
Education workers around the world are organising, striking and demanding better conditions, because the value of their labour is constantly taken for granted. Their struggles may take different forms, but they are part of the wider struggle of working people against exploitation and the prioritisation of private interests over social needs.
When teachers organise anywhere, they are part of the same international working-class struggle. Just last week in France, teachers joined thousands of other public-sector workers in a nationwide strike over pay and proposed budget cuts. French teachers’ unions have also backed students protesting against overcrowded schools and inadequate resources. For Nigerian teachers as well, that struggle must connect the fight for better wages and working conditions to the larger question of who controls society’s wealth and what that wealth is used for.
Beyond “Thank You”
So, on Teachers’ Day, we should do more than thank teachers. Teachers need strong unions. They need better wages. They need secure employment, proper facilities and decent working conditions. Every child needs a free, safe and fully funded school.
Neither will come from the bargaining table alone, because a ruling class that profits from cheap labour and an uneducated workforce has no interest in conceding them. Nigeria’s oil and mineral wealth, held today by a handful of parasites in power and their foreign partners, must be placed under the democratic control of working people and used to fund education for every child.
The struggle cannot end at the bargaining table.
Teachers and lecturers need organisation that connects their immediate economic struggles to the wider struggle over who controls society’s wealth and what that wealth is used for. They need to organise alongside other workers, students and oppressed communities, not simply to demand a slightly larger share of an unjust system, but to fight for a society organised around human needs rather than private profit.
That is the kind of political organisation we are building through The Naija Marxists.
Because the fight for better education is not separate from the fight for a better society.
Teachers are workers! Their struggles are our struggles. And education should belong to the people, not be sacrificed to the interests of capital.
This Teachers’ Day, we don’t just celebrate teachers. We stand with them in struggle.
Aluta continua!