For the third time in less than a year, university lecturers are on strike. On March 1, a seven-day notice given by the Universities Academic Staff and Union (UASU) expired, ushering in another bout of a strike that could have been avoided. The costs, time, resources and opportunities these regular disputes cause to stakeholders are unimaginable.

We have a complex situation where state institutions find no problem disregarding court anchored agreements and court orders. This is unsurprising. In the last few weeks, court directives have been contemptuously ignored. Moreover, there seems to be determined efforts at trivialising legitimate expressions of labour grievances. The presser convened by Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohammed and university students’ leaders was in bad taste.