The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Professor Tahir Mamman

  • Hostage situation

    Hostage situation

    • By Mike Kebonkwu

    The educational system in Nigeria has been under crises and badly mismanaged and supervised.  Now the system is holding young adults of school age under hostage of yet to be properly articulated federal government policy on age limit of entry.  The Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman in the midst of more serious problems in the industry is pushing for enforcement of age limit of 18 years as minimum requirement for enrolments into tertiary institutions and writing of both West African Examination Council (WAEC) and National Examination Council (NECO) as well as the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examinations. This is a policy without a clear cut objective and benefits on any empirical basis for both the educational system and development of children of school age. Pegging the age of entry into tertiary institutions or age of writing WAEC, NECO, and JAMB at 18 years is taking our children hostages and distorting the academic development of the country. Many pupils currently in senior secondary three (SS3) who are billed to write these examinations for qualifying into tertiary institution are between ages 14 and 15 years; so what happens to them? 

    If it is an existing policy, it is out of tune with human capital development index in this 21st Century.  Is the problem that young people of 14 to 17 years lack the capacity to grasp with intellectual or academic requirement or pursuit to study in the university?  The human species has a fully developed mental acumen and capacity to undertake any course of study at a young age.  Young people like children are like tabula rasa and open to any information available to them and therefore it is necessary to fill them with the right information before they get into adolescent distraction of youthful fancies. 

    Educationists and psychologists have not come out to tell us why young adults at age 15 or 16 should not be enrolled in the university.  Whatever reason any person may have could also apply equally to adults of 18 years and above. The policy is ill conceived and will not serve any good other than complete the destruction of the school system and plunge young people and parents into greater misery.  Our educational system has been virtually destroyed by poor funding and neglect and the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman who is incidentally a professor of law is determined to take it to the next level by disrupting the academic careers of children and young people by insisting that universities should not admit any candidate below 18 years under the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) conducted by JAMB.

    It is an empirical fact that the intellectual and creative energies of human beings are unleashed in formative years and not when they begin to get distractions of youthful and adolescence fancies; catch them young!  Why peg age of entry to the university at 18 years, are the children going to warfare as combat soldiers or enlistment into the military that you put the age of entry at 18 years and above?  Government should not be seen to deliberately slow down the human capital development of children through such a backward educational policy.  

    This is the same country where we do not have problem marrying off a child of 14 years to become a mother even with the attendant health implications, and you do not want another child to enter the university at 15 or 16 years. In this same country, the labour law allows a child of 13 and 14 to be apprenticed to learn any trade or vocation and children that same age cannot engage in academic activity at tertiary level!

    Why stop children with capacity for academic pursuit from pursuing their dream?   We watch Japanese, Korean and Chinese children with creative geniuses developing apps (software) and other electronic devices in factories which they ship to us and generate foreign exchange and income to their economy and you are here legislating for stagnation of your own children and future of this country.  Every critical stakeholder in the education industry should speak up; parents and school administrators.  The National Association of Nigeria Students (NANS) should see this as a noble course to fight and one also challenge the Academic Staff Unions of  Universities (ASUU) not to look the other way against this retrogressive policy just to be politically correct. 

    Where did we get the research findings that a young person age 16 cannot carry the academic workload of studies in the university when in other climes, young people as early as age 22 are bagging their PhD in Science and Humanities.  I challenged a professor friend of mine at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife to provide me with empirical study or finding why young people under 18 years should be suspended from proceeding to university.  I did not get more than the cant which some scholars in education as a branch of knowledge bandy as psychomotive and cognitive development, which is not more than natural growth and development of human being mental and physical. Translated to education, it does not say that a young person of 15 or 16 does not have mental or physical capacity for pursuit of education at a higher level.  This current campaign is against the child’s right to education, and it is contrary to justice equity and good conscience. 

    Just as one’s head was running riot on this confusion about our school administrators, someone posted the story of a certain Dorothy Jean Tillman a 17 year old girl that bagged a PhD in the United States.  The government probably thinks that making people to go to school late will reduce the number of graduate unemployment by raising the bar and age, and therefore reduce pressure on it to provide employment.  This is poverty of logic and thought.  At home if you do not watch over your children, they will be wayward just the say way they will be wayward even in old age at school when the schools do not provide the right curriculum to engage them. 

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    What does the Counselling Unit of universities do if they cannot take care of the needs of young people in the universities assuming it becomes an issue of concern?  The life span of average Nigerian was put at about 52 years in 2021, which with the poverty level, hunger and insecurity would have plummeted  and so you want someone to enrol in the university when he is close to his grave!  We should not allow people without critical reasoning and low mentality to kill the creative energies in children and young people to get knowledge. 

    We expect the minister of education to engage critical stakeholders to develop academic model that will put our school system on the same pedestal as you have in the Ivy League universities in the world.  He should think out of the box and look for novel ways of funding education rather than stagnate our school system through ill-informed policies that he is thoughtlessly pursuing without logic. Let us stop praying for Nigeria to succeed; God will not hear us; let us start putting the right things and right people to drive the country. Should the young children be left on the street on sabbatical begging for alms while they wait to be 18 years old to enter the university? 

    Does the record show that young people in the universities are not performing; what is the problem?   We should resist this age limit policy and save the educational system and young people from this hostage situation! 

    • Kebonkwu, an attorney, writes from Abuja.
  • War over nothing

    War over nothing

    In a season where every Tom Joe touts the bragging rights to attack the government or anyone believed to be close to those in government over anything and nothing in particular, it comes as no surprise that the directive by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman to the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council not register candidates who are below 18 for next year’s school certificate examinations has become something of a casus belli around which some have found a new rally.

    If my memory serves me right, it’s been some six weeks since the Joint Admissions and Matriculation (JAMB) first broached the idea of returning our tertiary institutions to what they should be: a citadel of learning for matured minds. If that Abuja meeting, which I understand didn’t pass without its own fair dose of controversies, and one in which vice chancellors of universities were in audience, was to communicate government’s resolve to restore what was already an existing policy of pegging the university age at 18, only a few of us pretended to understand not to talk of taking the time out to chew on the implications of what was to come.

    Well, that day has some. The federal government has taken that final – or better still- necessary step to clean the mess! If a child is not expected to be in university until 18 – and so the reasoning went – why allow them, in the first place, to sit for the qualifying examination that would in the end, cause a breach to the rule?

    I perfectly understand the anger of those who think that the government acted rashly, and that some kind moratorium be granted to allow those caught in the web to sail, or even still, that those innocent children should not be punished for the mess they didn’t create but are merely the victims. Still have emerged, related arguments, that the government loses nothing by allowing the status quo since it poses no injury to anyone; and stranger still, that a government that condones marriage of under-18s should have no trouble finding space for 16-year-olds in its university system.

    These are persuasive arguments – details of which could be worked out; surely, they neither detract from the substance of government’s position nor whittle down the import of what the government seeks to do. 

    The irony is that some actually believe that the government shouldn’t even bother about pegging the university age for its would-be entrants. That in today’s world of precociousness, parents should have the liberty to offload their infants on the school system since the society, nay the world, is expected to pivot around their geniuses! In other words, the barely disguised outsourcing of parental responsibilities to teachers and minders counts for nothing since, in some people’s opinion, the society ultimately benefits from early learning by kids!

    To be sure, there have been many more things that have been said about the new measure in our peculiarly certificate-crazy society that citing them would simply add no value save for their nuisance!

    That is how banal things can sometimes get.

    Talk of the new age; the old rule under which children are expected to be properly weaned off their mother’s breast milks before thinking of ‘school’ is gone forever. What of that mandatory stipulation of yore that the child’s right hand, slung over the head, must touch the left ear before venturing near the school gates? All are supposed to belong in the past!

    Convenient isn’t it – since it relives the parents of the guilt that an outsourced parenting brings!

     Imagine the government now stepping in to remind of a 6-3-3-4 policy said to be anchored on that golden rule and which carefully observed would leave no room for arguments. To some, the government rather than propelling the society forward is actually doing the opposite! See how jaded an argument can be?

    Yes, I understand the penchant for the rat race the stuff of which has turned every nth neighbourhood shed into schoolrooms; the associated culture that has turned parents, with neither the luxury of time nor the pleasure of parenting, to perfect strangers to their children. The abominable pressure of moving the children at neck-breaking speed to the next level no matter how nebulous and uncertain is what stands condemnable and must be condemned.

    I recall a riotous scene in my son’s school years back: the commandant of the school, (it is a military school) had, at a PTA meeting insisted on not allowing students in the second year of their senior secondary school programme to have a shot at external WAEC and NECO on the ground that it was distracting to the students and hell was let loose! The parents, apparently couldn’t understand why the school authorities would not indulge their wards the luxury of having their O’ Level grades in the kitty before their formal shot at it a year after! The rat race, as it was as now, remains to yours truly, stranger than fiction.

     How about the unholy matrimony between school proprietors and parents which has eventuated in the crash programme of primary and secondary education as indeed the engulfing anomie which the government now seeks to purge?

     It seems inevitable that the changes which seek to reset the deviation from the normal to the normal will be fiercely resisted. That is the point the country is at the moment.

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    And while we are at, we must thank Prof Farooq A. Kperogi for letting Nigerians know that in United States, ‘students apply to enter universities between the ages of 18 and 19’ and that in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, South Africa, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, etc. countries that Nigerians love to cite, that anything less than 18 is an aberration in the university system.

    And whereas these countries have a special place for their exceptional gifted pupils; they are treated as exceptions rather than the rule. And the idea of gifted children is certainly not new to Nigeria and Nigerians as some critics of the measure by government appear to suggest, which was why the one in Suleija was established.

    To get back to the point; Prof Mamman is right. He deserves the support of everyone that means well for this country. Needless to add that he’s done nothing outside of the statutes to justify the demand for his head. One urges his critics to let him – and Nigeria – be.