A nationwide school shutdown over King’s College, Lagos, was suspended Monday night. The concession that caused it is still being implemented. What the unions got was a seven-member committee, two of its seats held by the association taking over the school.

On September 4, the Ministry of Education wrote to King’s College informing it that the 117-year-old school was being handed to its Old Boys’ Association under a long-term public-private partnership. That letter set up its own six-month transition committee, separate from the one announced Monday, with instructions to complete the handover within that window. After six months, federal funding from the Federation Account stops. The King’s College Old Boys’ Association president called it the start of a renaissance. The teachers’ and civil servants’ unions inside the federal ministry called it a sale, and on September 10 ordered every Federal Unity College in the country to stay shut until the concession was reversed.

For days it held. Students who’d travelled for resumption were turned away at locked gates. At Federal Government Girls’ College, Sagamu, one parent, Mrs Gladys Bello, said the arrangement would raise fees and push out the children of poorer families, warning that the child of the poor man may no longer have access to these schools once private money starts running them.

Resumption, originally scheduled for Saturday, September 12, never happened as planned. Later attempts to reopen on September 13 and again on September 14 were also disrupted. By Monday evening the standoff was over.

The Trade Union Congress announced the suspension after a meeting in Abuja with the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa. Alausa confirmed that implementation of the King’s College Old Boys’ Association takeover would proceed. What he offered instead was a seven-member committee, two seats reserved for the ministry, two for the union, one for the labour ministry, and two for the Old Boys’ Association itself, given one to two weeks to recommend additions to an agreement already in force.

The one concrete thing the government moved on was jobs. Alausa assured staff that no one would be dismissed, or punished, over the dispute, and that deployment would continue under the Public Service Rules. That’s a real guarantee, and it was the demand unions raised loudest in the days their members went without pay. It says nothing about what King’s College will cost to attend once the Old Boys’ Association is running it, what it will pay its staff going forward, or what happens to the roughly 100 other Federal Unity Colleges that were never part of the concession but shut in solidarity with the one that was.

TUC General Secretary Nuhu Toro called the meeting fruitful and robust, and said the union would resume the action if it isn’t satisfied with what the committee recommends. That reservation is real. It’s also the only leverage the union has left, because the thing the action was actually called to stop, the handover itself, was never on the table Monday night. It was signed on September 4, before the first school gate closed over it.

King’s College Old Boys’ Association president Kashim Ibrahim-Imam had called the arrangement the start of a renaissance, with the alumni body financing, rehabilitating and modernising the 117-year-old school. The unions had called the same document a sale, a description the Ministry disputes, insisting the Federal Government retains legal title. Both framings are still attached to the same piece of paper. What changed between Sunday and Monday wasn’t the paper. It was who was willing to keep schools closed over it.

Peter Oluwaleye, chairman of King’s College’s own Parent-Teacher Association, had said before the settlement that no student was resuming until the dispute was resolved. Reporting in the days before the settlement put the number of affected colleges at either 106 or 112 of 115, depending on the outlet and the day counted. What every count agreed on was that it was nearly all of them, shut nationwide over a decision made about one school in Lagos.

Every Federal Unity College reopened Tuesday morning. Mrs Bello’s fee concern hasn’t been answered by the committee, which hasn’t met yet. Whether King’s College becomes cheaper to attend or more expensive under Old Boys’ Association management is a question the settlement didn’t resolve. It’s a question the settlement deferred, to a body two of whose members work for the people who are about to start running the school.

That’s not a small thing. A committee with a deadline and a mandate to recommend changes is a real avenue, not a fake one, and the government’s willingness to guarantee jobs took something off the table that mattered enormously to the people who’d walked out. A national shutdown across more than 100 schools bought a committee, not a reversal, not a pause on implementation. A committee reviewing a deal that’s already being carried out around it, with the people benefiting from that deal sitting on the committee reviewing it.