Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman may be out to create confusion in the education system by his insistence on the 18-year minimum age for tertiary school admission from this current academic year, 2024/2025.
He might not know that, maybe because it was not thought through, but it is very likely in the offing
Mr. Minister has furthered it by insisting that no child below that age can write the final and qualifying senior secondary education exams such as WAEC and NECO.
He might sound correct in his reasoning, but he is most likely about to create a litany of confusion that will work against the country if not wisely managed.
Legal confusion
*Section 18(1) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, provides that: “(1) Government shall direct its policy towards ensuring that there are equal and adequate educational opportunities at all levels.” government at all levels means the three tiers we operate.
That implies being on the concurrent list, meaning that states and LGAs have equal constitutional powers as the FG to make laws on education.
That’s why the LGAs are supposed to run primary education in Nigeria, states run secondary education and have also explored this provision to establish state tertiary institutions. We have 63 state universities presently. There are also 149 private universities.
Another law, the Universities Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Act, empowers universities to discharge their functions and exercise their responsibilities without undue external interference. That is the basis for the autonomy of universities.
Enforcement difficulties
On the strength of this law, how would the minister or his ministry compel state and private universities to fall in line with his decree?
With the autonomy law, one is persuaded to think the universities can make laws on its mode of admission, and bypass the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the 18-year age limit.
State universities can also do the same or states can just create their admission models. Because they are protected by the law that enabled them to create these universities, the federal government can’t do anything about that.
The federal government will be hard put in directing or compelling secondary schools not owned or operated by them on the age at which students will write the final exams.
States can also, leveraging the concurrent list, set up their qualifying examination bodies as the federal government did on NECO.
There is no known law attaching the old WAEC, a regional examination body to the federal government or excluding states from joining WAEC and exempting their students from writing NECO owned by the Federal Ministry of Education
In a situation where these possibilities are exploited by the states and private sector in the education industry, the federal government is left with implementing their age limit rules on federal tertiary institutions. How will these involved institutions fare? Who will apply to them and sit down at home to wait for 18 years? That’s a way to phase them out and make them unattractive to attend.
If Minister Mamman insists on this, what powers does his ministry have to compel employers that keep reducing their fresh entry age to align with this policy?
Because they are Nigerians who study outside Nigeria and can come back to get employed here, Mamman would have succeeded in shutting out products of Nigerian tertiary institutions from the competition for employment due to the labour market age limit discretion.
The minister should rethink this policy which is starting to look like the hasty pronouncement on fuel subsidy removal on May 29, 2023, that has plunged Nigeria into an economic mess without a remedy yet.
Let the ministry avoid the landmine of planning to share N10,000 and five cups of rice and three packs of noodles as a means of curing a government-made poverty due to its haste and lack of planning.
This policy will create crises if upheld in a country its graduates will compete with those from other worlds where young people are free to enroll in tertiary institutions as early as 14.
We should rather look inward to cure the ailment of the education that is certainly not the entry age to the universities.
If many Nigerian young people wrote their WAEC at 16 and 17 some 45 to 50 years ago and fared well in their higher education, we are not convinced that that age that has been in effect till now has become a retardation.
