In April 1978 the National Universities Commission, on the directive of Federal Commissioner for Education Colonel Ahmadu Ali, raised meal subsidy charges in the federal universities from 50 kobo to ₦1.50 per day — a tripling of the only cash outlay the average federal undergraduate had to make. The National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) under President Segun Okeowo of the University of Lagos coordinated a nationwide boycott of lectures and a march on the campuses to demand the increase be reversed.
On 17 April 1978 mobile police opened fire on demonstrators at the University of Lagos campus gate, killing Akintunde Ojo of the Faculty of Engineering. Similar shootings at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria (one student dead, the future medical lecturer Aliyu Marafa wounded) and at the University of Ibadan brought the official confirmed death toll to three; student union counts ran to ten. Federal Government dissolved NUNS, expelled Okeowo, and banned student demonstrations on every federal campus.
The regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo made a single concession: the meal subsidy increase was scaled back to ₦1.00 per day, and Colonel Ahmadu Ali was redeployed (he later returned as PDP National Chairman under Obasanjo's civilian presidency). The substantive issue — the collapse of federal university funding from 1976 onward — went unaddressed and produced the ASUU strike cycle from 1980. The slogan 'Ali Must Go' became the generic student demand against the next eight Education Ministers; the template — economic shock, youth protest, state shoots, partial cosmetic concession, no structural change — is the template of every subsequent Nigerian fees protest including the 2024 student loan protests.