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Nigeria operates the 6–3–3–4 system of education, whereby a child spends six years in primary school; three years each in junior and senior secondary education and four years in the tertiary education.
However, in July 2024, the Ministry of Education introduced a policy setting 18 years as the minimum age for tertiary institution admissions but made an exception for the 2024 admission cycle, which it said would accept candidates as young as age 16.
So, the Minister of Education, Prof. Mamman Tahir, announced during the 2024 policy meeting of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that the federal government had barred students under 18 years from writing the West African School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), National Examination Council (NECO) and Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), and other examinations for admission into other tertiary institutions of learning, beginning from next year.
The announcement elicited vicious opposition and muttering from education stakeholders present at the meeting. That was a pointer to how unpopular the hackneyed, knee-jerk policy is.
The minister, who explained that children were expected to spend five years in early child care, said they would be six years old by the time they enter primary one and complete primary school education at age 12, adding that the policy is in tandem with the 6-3-3-4 educational policy of the federal government.
Nevertheless, the decision of Tahir to peg the age at which students can write the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examinations (SSSCE) at 18 is not only outrageous but also primitive and retrogressive. It is bewildering that in a world where 13-year-olds are already degree holders, Tahir intends to retard the future of Nigerian children.
For instance, Dorothy Jean Tillman, is a Chicago, USA, teenager. At the age of 17, Ms. Tillman has just obtained a doctorate degree. She took her first university course at the age of 10. Tillman had obtained at the age of 14 an associate diploma, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. Now, at the age of 17, she is Dr. Dorothy Jean Tillman.
Is it not shameful, therefore, that, despite such exploits elsewhere in other climes, the federal government wants to daub Nigerian students in slavish backwardness, as if people cannot dare to be different from the norm, positively.
The new education policy is obsolete and authoritarian. It is even worse and lacks basis, and must be halted by government.
No matter its intention, it is not right to ambush Nigerians with a policy that has not been widely discussed by the National Council on Education, comprising the minister and commissioners for education in all states, the NUT, bodies such as WAEC, NECO, JAMB, UBEC and others.
There are gifted children that need special attention. In any case, gifted or not, it is not when a child writes the exams and passes it that matters. Why would you deny a child an opportunity to write an exam or, even worse, deny such a child an opportunity to advance, if he passes the exam, because of a headless policy?
Evidently, today’s children develop faster and start school earlier. No child should be stagnated because of some obscure policy to achieve ulterior motives. Even the computer age has made nonsense of the argument in favour of maturity; modern children mature much faster and even know more than their parents. This much Tahir knows.
There is no law stipulating age limit, especially for JAMB. So, the policy is illegal and should be challenged in court.
It is suspected that the minister may be pushing an agenda for the North. He is said to be unhappy with the widening educational disparity between the North and South and may be out to bridge that gap in a very unwholesome manner.
The North has so far narrowed other gaps between the two divides through unfair distortion of the geopolitics of the country via funny allocations of census figures and military fiat, undue promotion in the civil service, and political appointments at all levels of government, but it has so far failed to deal with the intellectual aspect that has to do with education. So, Tahir is seen to be unleashing an onslaught on the education sector in the furtive hope that it could give the North leverage.
The North must not continue to drag the country backwards. The tendency to run the economy based on northern templates and standards has grounded the country.
That is not to say, however, that there is something cognitively wrong with the North. Whatever is wrong is with the present crop of northern leaders with their entitlement mentality to the oil in the Niger Delta. They stay in Abuja and dictate who gets what and how.
Otherwise, the past leaders of the North did very well, a lot better than the present selfish leaders that have successfully manacled the region and the entire country to crawling poverty. They failed to take advantage of the large expanse of land in the region through mechanised agriculture. Rather, their lazy policies have thrust up a Frankenstein monster that is threatening to swallow the entire country.
Nigeria’s inability to define and enforce an education policy is at the root of this. The rudderless and inefficient implementation of the 6-3-3-4 or even 9-3-4 education policies means that our policymakers are out of touch with reality.
Allowing them to bring the same malaise to the education sector would spell doom for the country.
The suspicion is that Tahir just wants to impose northern education stultification across the board, but it must be resisted.
The North must build momentum to drive education in the region. Former President Goodluck Jonathan wanted to help when he established the nomadic education scheme and gave them unique almajiri schools. It failed because the northern elite killed it. They were more at home with the hordes of almajiri children they could easily manipulate and unleash on political opponents in times of crises.
Simply, the North has not been able to produce enough stimuli to encourage scholarship. They have only managed to politicise and monetise professorial attainment with vacuous intellect.
The President, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, must not allow this malfeasance to destroy southern students. The North knows what to do and should do it. Slowing down other Nigerians to match their slow pace cannot work. It is left for them to hasten their pace and initiate policies that would help them, instead of dragging the entire country back.
This is what true federalism is about. Each part of the country should be allowed to develop at its own pace. You cannot leash a thriving section to a point simply because of a limping member slowly ambling along. The entire edifice would collapse.
Ambushing the people with an ill digested policy because of failure to effectively enforce the 6-3-3-4 system of education is almost like the argument that fuel subsidy was removed because of smugglers. That is serious self-indictment by a government that has people manning the country’s borders.
Imagine a child that completes secondary school at 15 as in some cases currently. He now has to idle away for another three years before writing the UTME. Considering the prowling temptations all over the place, would that not be solving one problem but creating another, perhaps, worse?
The government should stop ambushing the people. It should go back to the junior secondary and allow the present crop of secondary school students to run their full course before tampering with the system.
By the way, is a student’s age the solution to the myriads of challenges confronting the education sector? Will a child’s age provide facilities for the decrepit sector? Will the year a child enters university address the protracted negligence of the tertiary institutions or honour the agreement successive governments reached with ASUU since 2009? How will a child’s age increase budgetary allocation to the starving sector? Is it because underage children are in the universities that sexual harassment and all manner of underhand dealings abound….?
There is cold comfort that the National Assembly has waded into the controversy even though it is doubtful how effective such an intervention could be.
The doubt stems from the apparent helplessness of a National Assembly whose directives are easily and consistently ignored by executive agencies. It makes one wonder what relevance a quisling or toothless National Assembly serves a beleaguered country like Nigeria.
