SIR: The National Assembly should pass any proposed bill limiting admission age to the university at 18 without further delay. They should not allow undue procrastination to skirt round this fine and plausible idea likely to save the country from mainly unintended head and belly aches.
Nigeria should wake up to join the rest of the global world who believe that university education is for adults and not minors or teenagers. The 1999 constitution also exemplifies a torchbearer in this direction by pegging the voting age limit to 18. By the Nigerian constitution, adulthood starts from 18.
People conversant with university administration and programmes would buttress the fact that the preponderance of students who are rusticated at the end of every session for poor academic performance are due to immaturity and poor understanding of the demands of their various courses.
In the university, students need maturity to deal with time-bound courses and vagaries of lecture times, in addition to recalcitrant lecturers who are always intolerant and would never bat an eyelid over immature and ipso-facto irresponsible students.
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In the university, lecturers lecture and not teach and this is where teenage students find normally their come-uppance and nemesis. There are child prodigies no doubt, but even then most geniuses fall easy prey to underage disease such that they become intolerable of others, including even their lecturers and invariably incur their wrath.
Whereas, maturity would have taught them that they owe much to their future greatness by being respective and also make others to count in the schemes of life.
Parents should be advised to desist from putting undue pressures on their children by falsely declaring their age so as to hasten their admission into the university.
Exemptions could however be granted to students reading medicine and other paramedical courses where students spend between six to seven years and further one or two years of housemanship or clinical training.
Such categories of students are likely to finish their university education between 24 or 25 years. By the time you add the one year compulsory NYSC service year, they would have become real grown up adults and citizens.
As a result of immaturity arising from under-age, most university students become pawn and errant persons in the hand of egregious matured students who use them unknowingly to foment troubles in the campuses of various universities.
The federal government must make good its decision on this issue of 18 years as age-limit for admission into the university. There should be no undue controversy skirting round its passage into law. Nigeria is not a banana republic where children become graduates without knowing their self-worth.
•Sunday Olagunju, Ibadan, Oyo State.