By Suyi Ayodele

“Could you ‘please, possibly, perhaps’, send me to Kano?” I told my editor last Wednesday.

“You will meet me there” was his response.

I laughed.

A moment later, a friend added his voice: “Why did the Kano government do such a thing under the table? They should have called for an expression of interest.”

We laughed again. I further suggested that the Kano State correspondent “should be penalised for concealing the info!” A friend extended the penalty: “Very well. His Bureau Chief too.”

The Bureau Chief came begging: “Oga mi sir. I am sorry sir. Help me appeal to them sir”

We all laughed.

In my place, they say when a matter goes beyond weeping, one can only laugh. That is exactly what we did that Wednesday morning.

Our laughter was over a news item by the Daily Trust newspaper that morning. The headline reads: “Hisbah allocates 50 mass wedding slots to kano journalists” According to the report, the Commander-General (see rank) of the Kano State Hisbah Board, Sheik Aminu Daurawa, announced that journalists practising in the state had been allotted 50 females out of the number of women that would be given out in mass marriage in the state. Sheik Daurawa, who said that the previous mass marriage during which 1,800 women were married off was a huge success, disclosed that the Hibah Board had decided to expand the scope by including professional bodies as beneficiaries of the mass wedding, and he was generous enough to allocate 50 slots, sorry, 50 women, to journalists in Kano State.

I read the story and I felt that the editor should post me to Kano that moment. Unfortunately, he too had his eyes on the 50 slots! My Editor was not alone, his General Editor too was calling for an “expression of interest” – who no like beta thing?

As I penned this, the possibility of going to Kano was still open as Sheik Daurawa had not disclosed the date for the second mass wedding, which the Islamic scholar said was conceived “to promote moral values in the society and reduce immorality among young men and women.” We shall return to Kano presently.

When it comes to matters of the other room, it does not rain in northern Nigeria, it pours. Something bigger than the Kano mass wedding is about to happen in another state in Northern Nigeria. On May 24, in the Year of the Lord, 2024, dignitaries from all walks of life will be gathering in Mariga Local Government Area of Niger State as the Speaker of the Niger State House of Assembly, Abdulmalik Sarkin-Daji, will be marrying off 100 girls in a mass wedding. Now, wait for it! These 100 girls are not willing spinsters of marriageable ages. No!

They are children who became orphans because bandits struck their villages and killed their parents!

The children became orphans not by their choices but by the failure of the government to protect them and their parents from the killer machines known as bandits. And to ‘ameliorate’ their suffering, the “Rt. Hon. Speaker” Sarkin-Daji decided that the best way to do so is to marry them off.

These wives-to-be are the luckiest of the 170 females under the same circumstance.

And if you think that Mr. Niger State Speaker is alone in this shenanigan, you are damned wrong! The governor of the state, Mohammed Umar Bago, and the Emir of Kontagora, Alhaji Mohammed Barau, are to serve as guardians to the female orphans during the mass marriage ceremony! Neither the governor nor the Emir has denied this.

What about the ages of the 100-would-be wives? While the ‘father’ of the mass brides, Sarkin-Daji, did not disclose their ages, a source, who should know, volunteered that the oldest among the ‘intending brides’ should be around 16 years! “This is just the conservative age. I know that a girl of 13 to 14 years in that locality is already a multiple mother”, my source volunteered! The speaker, who had already listed the proposed mass wedding of the orphans as part of his “constituency empowerment project aimed at alleviating the suffering of the impoverished”, waxed more ‘generous’ by saying that he would be paying the dowries for the bridegrooms, in addition to procuring “all necessary materials for the mass marriage ceremony.” And of course, his soulmate in the generous act, Sheik Aminu Daurawa of the Kano State Hisbah Board would be on ground to witness the ‘grand’ ceremony.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Bobrisky And Our Other S/He Offsprings

The mass weddings in Niger and Kano States would be conducted without any recourse to the psychological make-ups of the would-be-brides. I don’t also know if the would-be-husbands would also be allowed to ‘inspect’, feel and touch the girls, the way a buyer feels goats on their tethers before buying them. Don’t worry; we have sunk deeper than this as a nation! Phew!

On this page last week, we discussed the issue of the age of admission to Nigerian universities by the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, who proposed 18 years. His argument was that any child who goes to the university before the age of 18 is “too young.” The professor of Law further argued that those “too young” undergraduates “are not mature enough” to cope with the rigours of life in the tertiary institutions, and attributed most of the problems in our higher institutions to the ‘immature’ undergraduates. This is the irony of Nigeria. Professor Mamman is from the north. This is how a friend, Rev (Dr) Bola Adeyemi, responded to the referenced column last week: “In his part of the country, girls of 13 years of age ‘are mature’ for marriage; boys of under 18 years are mature enough for ‘almajarism’ and terrorism, but not for education.” I could not fault the Reverend gentleman. How on earth do we explain our situation to the sane nations of this world without sounding not all there? How do we justify the proposed mass wedding in Niger State without looking like people from the Stone Age to listeners from other countries?

Chapter Two of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (As Amended), deals with the “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy.” Section 14 (2) (b) of the same chapter states specifically thus: “the security and welfare of the people SHALL be the PRIMARY PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT (emphasis mine)” This is exactly the responsibility the government has failed to discharge in Niger State, and in most states of the north, and the entire country in general. On a daily basis, we read, hear or witness, the killings of Nigerians in their homes, on their farms, on the highways and schools’ dormitories, by felons the state was expected to checkmate. About two days ago, bandits stormed a university in Kogi State and whisked away about 15 students.

Everywhere you turn in Nigeria, it is like the song of the iconoclast, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, “sorrow, tears and blood”. Yet we have various levels of government. We have people we voted to power to do the job for us. We have the National Security Adviser (NSA), whose only interest is to collect cybersecurity tax while bandits kill at the rate of 10 for two Kobo! We have Generals in all our Armed Forces; we have an Inspector General of Police and other top hierarchies who superintend the rank and file. Bandits struck in Niger State, as in other places. Parents were killed. Children were orphaned as a result of such crass irresponsibility on the part of the government. The only response we got is a proposed mass wedding for 100 orphans, whose parents were victims of a remiss government, to only God-knows-who suitors! Who are we as a people? What are the core values of our being as a nation?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Odi, Zaki Biam And Okuama: Beyond Sentiments

The education of the girl-child has been a troublesome issue in Nigeria. A February 26, 2024, article on the issue, titled: “Gender desks on frontline of girls’ education in Nigeria”, and sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO’s International Institute for Education Planning, states: “In Nigeria, where 50% of girls are not attending school at the basic education level, major planning efforts are underway to promote gender equality in and through education.” The paper posits that between 2024 and 2027, the roadmap for the Education Sector “aims to bring 15 million out-of-school children back to school in the next four years.” Again, in an earlier piece by Ada Dike of Daily Times newspaper, published on October 15, 2023, on the topic; “Problems facing girl-child education in Nigeria”, the author said: “poverty, peer pressure, early marriage, unwanted pregnancy, being their family’s burden bearers and lack of parental care are parts of the challenges hindering girl child education in Nigeria”. All these identified factors are more prevalent in the north. The most vicious of them all is the issue of “early marriage”, the type Speaker Sarkin-Daji of Niger State and Sheik Daurawa of Kano Hisbah Board, are promoting with crass impunity.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), as of October 23, 2023, gave the figure of out-of-school-girls in Nigeria to be 7.6 million, with the caveat: “mostly from the northern region.” Of the 20.2 million figures of out-of-school children in the country, the international body said that over 60 percent of the total is from the North. The figure, as given by Christian Munduate, UNICEF Nigeria Country Representative, in Kano, during the International Day of the Girl Child 2023, which had the theme: “Our Time is Now – Our Rights, Our Future”, said: “Nigeria, alarmingly, accounts for 15% of out-of-school children worldwide. Yet, only a mere 9% of the poorest girls have the chance to attend secondary school. This is not just a statistic, it’s a wake-up call…” She added that Kano State ranked second in the number of out-of-school girls in Nigeria, with Kebbi State leading with 67.7 percent.

The elite of the north, nay all Nigerians, should be deeply worried that the data on literacy level published, recently, by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), showed that of the 10 uneducated states in Nigeria – Kebbi, Yobe, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, and Niger States, all make the list! Little wonder then the states in the north have a large number of girls to be married off at mass wedding ceremonies. That is our collective shame as a nation. This is why Nigeria keeps crawling, and drooling, 64 years after independence. No matter the pace the other regions of the country intend to take, our stunted brothers up north would keep slowing us down!

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Can I Tell Our First Lady That Graduates Drive Cabs Here, Too?

The girl-child is an endangered specie in the north. We all witnessed how a former two-term governor and senator of Zamfara State, Ahmad Sani Yerima, was changing neonates as wives the way a nursing mother changes diapers. We only watched and we did nothing! The man sat in the hallowed chamber of our highest law-making body to join in making laws “for the good governance of the country” while he wantonly destroyed our future with his incurable paedophilic propensity. The best we did was to hide under the blackmail of culture and religion. We never interrogated the mentality of a man above 60 years pulling his trousers at the sight of a 13-year-old girl! And we have millions of Yerimas all over the country, prowling and devouring our young girls. Nobody says a younger girl should not marry her grandfather if that is where she finds ‘love’. Our argument here is that it is morally wrong, mentally inconceivable and legally inappropriate for any man, no matter his age, status and political exposure, to snatch an underage girl in the name of marriage. Nigeria practises universal adult suffrage. That gives one the feeling that the age of consent cannot be lower than the voting age of 18 years.

Even, on a moral scale, picking an 18-year-old for marriage while her mates are still in school is eternally despicable. But our leaders do it with impunity! The deposed Emir of kano State and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (SLS), secretly wedded Sa’adatu Barkindo Mustapha, the daughter of Lamido Adamawa, in 2016, at the age of 18, before making the affair public in 2020, when Sa’adatu turned 22. The former Emir of Kano was 55 years old then! But that was not all with the deposed traditional ruler. In the same 2016, SLS was fingered in the abduction of Ese Oruru, a 14-year-old girl from her Yenagoa, Bayelsa State home, by one Yinusa, aka Yellow. The girl was taken to the Emir of Kano’s palace, where she was forced to ‘marry’ Yinusa. Attempts to retrieve the little Oruru from SLS’s palace were met with stiff resistance until Nigerians rose in an outcry. One of those who fought for Oruru’s release, Fineman Peters, said then: “This case defies sanity… This is the most blatant state-sponsored case of paedophile (sic) that I have ever seen…”

The barbaric case of paedophilia which Google defines as “sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object. Specifically: a psychiatric disorder in which an adult has sexual fantasies about or engages in sexual acts with a prepubescent child”, is not a native of the north. It has mild and largely negligible expressions in virtually all states of the Federation. The difference between the north and other parts of the country is in its prevalence up north and the tendency to wear cultural and religious cloaks on such an act of depravity. From Delta to Edo, Osun to Ekiti; Akwa Ibom to Rivers and Abia to Enugu States, cases of cradle snatchers abound. We have senators whose pastime is seeking young girls to devour.

One of them from one of the Niger Delta States, an unrepentant paramour, who would not go for outright under-age girls, stocks his harem with girls that could easily pass for his granddaughters! We all condoned him and rewarded him with an election to a higher legislative chamber. The shame of it is on all of us! Now, the chicken is coming home to roost. On Sunday, May 12, 2024, we all read the account of the 28-year-old father of little Faith, a five-year-old girl, who posted on his Instagram page, the naked photos of the toddler. Faith’s father, who had since been arrested in his Auchi base, by the men of the Edo State Police Command, was said to have taken the poor little girl to a hotel, took off her clothes and took her naked photos which he uploaded on his Instagram handle! Thank God for the immediate response of the police on this matter.

When one begins to read cases like these, especially from our brothers up north, one cannot but feel sad. Ironically, the region we all pity is like the proverbial troubled soul on whose behalf we all fast and pray, but who keeps on having three full meals everyday (eni aa tori e gbawe to nje osan). How do we address this issue? That informed the banters at the beginning of this piece. The elders of my place say: oro to ba koja ekun, erin laa fi rin – when a matter goes beyond weeping, one can only laugh). And like we say in the Niger Delta region: make persin laugh before persin kpai! Let me ask my editor again: Any chance of going to Kano?

By Lasisi Olagunju

I do not believe that the president of any country will deliberately wreck everything. Their problem may be arrogance or ignorance – or arrogance in ignorance. Or, they may be worshipping wrong gods or feeding their gods with what they must not eat.

You remember Sir Shina Peters’ song for M.K.O. Abiola on the billionaire’s implacable friends who refused to eat his food?

“You gave smooth pounded yam to your friend,

Your friend refused to eat.

You made soft, mushy amala for your friend,

Your friend refused to eat.

You called your friend,

Your friend refused to answer you.

You do not know what they say you did wrong.”

There are at least two sides to a story such as this. Why would I give my friends food and they refuse to eat? Why would I shout their names and they ignore me? Am I calling the right names? If my offerings are right, shouldn’t I then check if they are really my friends?

The ace musician sang that song years before June 12 happened to Abiola. The musician may not know, but that chant is straight from the lore studio of the priests of life.

The foundation story of the song I tell here:

One ancient Yoruba king called Oniregba Osodi, at the beginning of his reign, asked his priests if his era would be peaceful and prosperous. The king was told to take care of all birds in his kingdom because they were hungry and angry and would hurt his happiness.

“What should I do and where are the birds?” the king should ask that question but he did not ask. He was the smartest and the wisest human being around, so he thought.

Instead of asking for directions, the king announced that he knew the road and blurted out orders. He commanded every man and woman in his kingdom to bring out all their grains and feed their ducks and fowls. The people brought out their corn and guinea corn and fed their ducks and pigeons, chicks and chickens.

The king was happy and satisfied.

But, the real hungry, angry birds were looking and watching.

“This oba is king also in idiocy,” they concluded and resolved to teach the powerful how to be wise.

Then, they struck. Nothing Oniregba did amounted to anything. He moved from market to farm, all was in vain. His efforts were like Abiku’s bangles in Soyinka’s lines. He sent his servants on an errand, they did as Alaafin Aole’s spell ordered them: The messengers did not come back. They even did worse. They created their own message, like Afonja did, and delivered the same to an audience different from their lord’s. Wracked by hunger and want, shouts of “ebi npa wá” rent the town while disease and death and general pestilence reigned.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Petrol Pains, Wilderness Wanderings

In the midst of the commotion, the sad king, in tears, challenged his priests on the failure of their prescription. “False prophets,” he called them.

They replied the king that he did not feed the birds as they counseled him to.

He said he did. They told him he didn’t.

The king gave a detailed account of his specific orders and how they were carried out.

The priests exchanged looks and laughed. They told the king: “Kabiyesi, you offered the wrong sacrifice to the wrong birds in the wrong place.”

The wise ones moved near the king and, in plain language told him who was hungry and angry and needed to be fed. He wondered why the priests did not tell him this the other time; the priests reminded him of his haste, his arrogance, ignorance and lack of decorum. “You didn’t wait and didn’t ask,” they told him. The king’s royal head wisened. He was sober. Now, he did what the priests told him to do. He didn’t have to wait long before his salvation came. His reign was long in peace, happiness and prosperity.

And, so, in Iregba till tomorrow is the song:

We made smooth and soft pounded yam,

We gave the birds of Iregba,

The birds said no, they won’t eat.

We rolled out pots of succulent amala for the birds of Iregba,

The birds said it was not their food,

They refused to eat…

When we gave the right meals to the big birds,

They ate and chirped with joy…

I did not make this story up. If you are a Yoruba and you are like me with a knowledgeable ancestor, consult him. Even if the forebears are like mine, long dead, their undying spirit should whisper to you the truth in the tale. But if you have no father and no mother, and you have no idea where their bones rest, put a call through to Professor Wande Abimbola. He has the knowledge. Or you can go to Chief Yemi Elebuibon in Osogbo. The tale is his to retell. He has a fuller version recorded in one of his books.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: For Yoruba Muslims And Pentecostals

Except he retraces his steps and changes the deity he serves, by the time Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu ends his tenure, he will be remembered for creating greater misery and more poor people than have ever lived in Nigeria. I don’t think that will be an enviable legacy. But he chose it. Every king writes the history of his era.

When a government neglects the road, opts for the bush and pumps efforts into wrong ideas, what it does is the same as starving the birds of life. Its efforts will, till eternity, roll up and down the hill like the boulder of condemned Sisyphus, the devious tyrant of Ephyra who violated “the sacred hospitality tradition” by killing visitors “to show off his power.”

Let us look at it. You moved the price of petrol from less than N200 to almost N1000 and upended every plan in every home. You pushed the naira tumbling down Mount Everest and clapped for yourself as a man of courage. Your Sango’s stone celts struck the market and shocked food prices beyond the reach of the hungry. People who need food, you continue to feed them hope in poisoned cans of tax, more tax and more levies.

Until now, I never knew that the introduction of taxes and levies could be celebrated as achievements by a government. Our government has that epaulette proudly emblazoned on its right and left shoulders. And we are so pinned down in helplessness.

The history of tax is one of intrigue. In ancient times, it was levy to fight wars. In medieval times, it was what Terence Dwyer (2014) calls “a fee derived entirely from surpluses” – the same thing Adam Smith prescribed as the “ability to pay”. In modern times, tax has become “a burden on production.” Why should people pay tax to an absent government? Tax theorists say tax is payment for government services. In ‘The Birth and Death of Taxes’ (1977) economic historians, Edward Ames and Richard Rapp, trace the history of tax as a feature of government’s economic life. They tell us that there is “a public good called protection, the suppliers of which are called governments.” They say a government “has a monopoly over the supply of protection to its subjects and taxes are the price paid to the monopolist.” They take it further, identifying two kinds of protection: one is defence, the other justice. They say when a threat is from foreigners, there is a demand for defence. When the threat is internal, one group of the same population unleashing threats against another, the good on demand is justice. Both goods should normally be exclusively government products. But, you and I know this may not always be so. A government that provides neither defence nor justice but still demands and collects tax is simply extortionate. In that case, what should the subjects do?

A newspaper on Sunday said the president had halted the proposed collection of cyber security levies from the poor and the rich. If it is true, I salute and thank the president. But, should that demand ever have been contemplated at all? What law backed the collection order in the first place? Who should collect and manage taxes under a just, normal law, the Federal Inland Revenue Service or an office created strictly to advise on security?

While we sheepishly surrender and pour libation to Abuja’s god of extortion, we are being offered as cheap ingredients for money ritual. CBN’s demand for cybersecurity tax from everyone, including sellers of pepper and locust beans, was said to be rooted in the Cybersecurity Act 2015 and its 2024 amendment. But that is not correct. The law mentions neither you nor me, nor the sweaty yam seller next street.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Murder And Vengeance In Okuama

Let us check what the law contains. Section 44 (1) of the Cybersecurity Act 2015 says: “There is established a Fund, which shall be known as the National Cyber Security Fund (in this Act referred to as “The Fund”).” Subsection (2) adds that “There shall be paid and credited into the Fund established under subsection (1) of this section and domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria: (a) A levy of 0.005 of all electronic transactions by the businesses specified in the Second Schedule to this Act.” And what is in that Second Schedule? The Second Schedule is plain; it habours neither the jìbìtì nor the rìkísí which we read in the CBN circular. The Schedule says: “Businesses which section 44 (2)(a) refers to are: (a) GSM Service providers and all telecommunication companies; (b) Internet Service Providers; (c) Banks and other Financial Institutions; (d) Insurance Companies; (e) Nigerian Stock Exchange.” The 2024 Act amended the 2015 Act without touching the Second Schedule. Indeed, the Amendment Act reinforces that schedule by prescribing punishments for non-payment of the levy by the businesses so listed (see Subsection 8 of the Amendment Act). So, where did Tinubu’s Central Bank of Nigeria get its long turenchi demanding that you and I start paying cyber security levies to an office that already has its share of the budget?

Apparently some people needed more money for the next night party, they did the maths and felt what the listed companies would pay them wouldn’t be enough for their frolics. They then converted all of us to ‘businesses’ without bothering to tinker with the law as they did in February. They simply asked the CBN to help them rewrite the law with a wordy circular. They did so knowing that we are a conquered people who won’t bother to check what the law truly says.

Even the businesses listed in that cyber security law will argue that they are being unfairly taxed. You would know and agree with them if you apply the theory of tax as payment for public goods. What does the government sell to them that warrant incessant taxation? How many of those businesses get ‘defence’ or ‘justice’ from the government as we know it?

“Nigerians pay one of the highest implicit tax rates in the world — way higher than developed countries,” African Development Bank’s president, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, cried out in January 2021 at a Federal Inland Revenue Service Tax Dialogue. “Think of it”, he said “they provide electricity for themselves via generators; they repair roads to their neighborhoods, if they can afford to; there are no social security systems; they provide security for their own safety; and they provide boreholes for drinking water with their own monies.” Yet, more taxes and levies are rolled out daily against us like Israeli armoured tanks in Gaza.

We should be afraid. There was a time in France when the people were compelled to purchase salt by the government which also forced them to pay extortionate tax on it. Kings and principalities historically taxed the most important ‘goods’ of life. Salt has always been that important – even the word ‘salary’ is related to salt; you may check the history of its Latin root ‘salarium’. And, so it was heavily taxed. The French called the salt tax la gabelle. Historians Theodore Sands and Chester Higby in 1949 published an article on ‘France and the Salt Tax’. In it, they recall that the history of the gabelle under the Ancien Regime is “largely a story of increasing taxation and flourishing abuses.” They say there was even a king of France who monopolized the sale of salt and made the people pay salt tax without selling salt to them. They add that it was a period when the government was “satisfied to receive the money supplied by the system and forgot the people who paid it.” The repercussion was an insurrection that pillaged the rich and, later, ignited the French Revolution.

Today’s Nigerians are like the birds of ancient Iregba. They are hungry and angry. In his ‘Salt, Politics and the French Revolution’, Toby Jaffe warns that “everyday commodities, including food, have the power to uproot, shatter and recreate societies…The revolutionary events around the salt tax of 18th-century France teach us that something as deceptively simple as salt can be a spark plug for civil unrest and revolution.” Now that Nigeria taxes everything including hunger, may God give us the fortitude to bear what may be coming.

The author, Dr. Lasisi Olagunju is the Saturday Editor of Nigerian Tribune, and a columnist in the same newspaper. This article was first published by the paper (Nigerian Tribune). It is published here with his permission.

By Suyi Ayodele

Oluwafemi Ositade is a 17-year-old student of the Ambassadors College, Ota, Ogun State. He is a child every parent would want, and every nation would adore and celebrate. The boy broke the internet recently when the news broke that the prodigy gained scholarships to 14 different universities outside the shores of Nigeria. According to the news, little Ositade who participated in the popular Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), scored a total of 760 marks out of 800 with a Cumulative Grade Points Aggregate (CGPA) of 4.04/4.0. The performance earned him full scholarships to many Ivy League universities such as Harvard in the United States of America, and other top-notch universities in Canada and the Middle East.

The universities that have offered the genius full scholarships include Harvard University, Brown University, Duke University, University of Toronto Lester B Pearson Scholarship, Wesleyan University, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, University of Miami, Howard University, Stetson University, Fisk University, University of Toronto, Mississauga Campus, University of Toronto St. George Campus, University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus and Drexel University. These universities are not concerned about the ‘maturity’ or otherwise of the 17-year-old boy. They are interested in his brilliance and what he could achieve in his cradle for the betterment of mankind. That is how advanced countries think. That is how those who run governments in sane climes project for the future. They are never tied down by antediluvian policies.

Last week, Nigerians were served with the sad news of the woeful performances of the candidates who participated in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). Of the 1.8 million candidates who sat for the examination, 1.4 million of them were said to have scored below 200 out of 400 marks. Terrible results! But while parents, guardians and Nigerians generally were bemoaning the horrible UTME results, the news broke that from inside the black pot, a whitish substance in terms of agidi (eko) had come out.

From the Bullamakanka town of Omu Aran, Kwara State, came the news of a 15-year-old genius, Olukayode Victor Olusola, who scored 362 marks in the same UTME. Olusola, a student of Government Secondary School, Omu Aran, scored 95 marks each in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry and 77 in English Language. He intends to study Electrical Electronics Engineering at the University of Ilorin, Kwara State. That should be good news to his parents, his school and every human being with a good sense of merit. But we are in Nigeria. Despite this sterling performance, Olusola may have to wait for the next three years before he can fulfill his dream of a university education. Why? Someone high up there feels and thinks that a 15-year-old, who could study to score 362 marks out of 400 marks obtainable, is “too young” to be in the university. If the brilliant boy were to be an American, or a citizen of any of the other forward-looking Western countries, he would be celebrated. Here, we think in the opposite direction of where the advanced world faces! Too sad!

Penultimate week, precisely on Monday, April 22, 2024, our Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, was in the news. It was for, to be humorous and obsolete, the ‘wrongest’ of all reasons. The minister, while on an inspection of the UTME being held across the country then, said that the admission age for all undergraduate courses in our tertiary institutions would henceforth be 18 years. The position of the minister runs in contrast to the existing regulation in most universities, which is to the effect that a candidate must have attained the age of 16 years or would have done so on the first day of October in the year of his/her candidature. In 2022, the Senate Committee on Basic Education said that 16 years would be the age of admission. The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, told the Senate Committee that JAMB had no powers to disqualify any candidate on the basis of age. He emphasised that individual universities could determine age to admit as the case maybe. Most universities peg their admission at 16 years. Obafemi Awolowo University, (OAU), Ile Ife, for instance, has no age limit. There was no age limit when I gained admission into the school in the late 80s and the situation remains the same till date. So, between our universities and the Minister of Education, who is right?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Where Are Yoruba’s Soldier Ants?

The minister, a professor and thinker, ‘justified’ his position on the age of admission to the university. According to him, parents who allowed their children to go into the university at the age of 16 “are pushing their children too much”. To arrest the situation, Mamman, after giving a pass mark for the conduct of the examination said: “The other thing which we noticed is the age of those who have applied to go to the university. Some of them are really too young. We are going to look at it because they are too young to understand what the university education is all about. That’s the stage when students migrate from a controlled environment where they are in charge of their own affairs. So, if they are too young, they won’t be able to manage properly. That accounts for some of the problems we are seeing in the universities. We are going to look at that. Eighteen is the entry age for university. But you will see students, 15, 16, going to the examination. It is not good for us. Parents should be encouraged not to push their children too much.” The minister then proffered a solution, to wit: The only solution to that is skills; by talking skills right from the time they entered school, from the primary school. Somebody should finish with one skill or another. That is part of the assumption of the 6-3-3-4 system…”

I have tried to rationalise what informed the minister’s posture without success. Why do we always think backward in this part of the world? All over the world, we see, and hear stories of child prodigies doing exploits. But here we are talking about a 16 or 17-year-old child being “too young” to be in the university. What about special children, the ones we call geniuses- the likes of Ositade and Olusola mentioned above? What do the advanced nations of the world do to them? Ositade, who in the estimation of Professor Mamman is “too young” to be in the university, has secured 14 different full scholarships outside Nigeria! This is where our problem lies as a nation.

If we accept the proposal by the minister, it means that a child who completed his or her secondary school education and passed all the qualifying examinations at the age of 16 would have to wait for another two years before he or she could be admitted into the university. What would such a child be doing at home for the two years interval? Are there government established intermediate vocational centres where such children could go? Or they would just be at home waiting for ‘old age’ to write their UTME? Did Professor Mamman give consideration to the damage the two-year break could cause? Under whose watch would the children be during the two-year hiatus? Do we talk about the possibility of waning enthusiasm, interest, frustration and other psychological effects? All these are by the way. It is obvious that the minister spoke from the point of ignorance. That indeed is very unfortunate in itself! The extant law on admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria today pegs the age at 16 years. Any child who is 16 years of age by October of the year he or she seeks admission is qualified. There is nothing in the books for now to show that this position has changed. We copied a lot from the Western world. I think we should also copy their mode of education and the policies therein. We need to do this if indeed we must compete with them.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Why Were Miyetti Allah And Tinubu’s Iyaloja In Ibadan?

The oldest, and one of the best universities in the world, is the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. A check on the university’s admission requirements for undergraduate courses revealed that: “The University does not set any age requirements (except for the Medicine course: please see below), but applicants for all undergraduate courses will be expected to demonstrate a mature approach to the study of their subject which includes demonstrable skills of critical analysis, wide contextual knowledge and the ability to manage their time independently.” The only condition the university gives for intending undergraduate students below age 18 is as stated: “If you intend to begin your course before your eighteenth birthday, we recommend that you consult the college to which you are applying to discuss your application, as they will wish to consider provision for your welfare.” It is only candidates seeking admission in the university’s medical college that are required to be 18 years of age “at the time they start the Medicine course. The clinical contact in our programme starts in the first term and means that younger students would not be able to take part in required elements of the course. For Medicine, your application will not be shortlisted unless you will be at least 18 years old on the 1 November of your first term.”

The same applies to most Ivy League universities in the United States of America. Come to think of this. It is on record that Harvard University for example, had, as far back as 1909, that is 115 years ago, admitted an 11-year-old into the institution! William James Sidis (April 1, 1898- July 17, 1944) entered the university at age 11. Described as an “American child prodigy”, Sidis’ father first sought admission for him at age nine but was rejected by the university. Two years later, Boris Sidis, the psychiatrist father of the genius, convinced the university to admit his son, who is recorded in history as having “an IQ between 250 and 300 and conversant in 25 languages and dialects”. A year after his admission, Sidis was said to have “lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies”. One of those who met Sidis in Harvard, Norbert Wiener, in his book, “Ex-Prodigy”, said of Sidis thus: “The talk would have done credit to a first or second-year graduate student of any age…talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child.”.

By the age of 16, Sidis, on June 18, 1914, left the university with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Imagine if Sidis were to be in the Nigeria of Mamman and the backward policy of age limit! Yet, we have many Sidis as our children in Nigeria. Yet again in the same Kwara State of Olukayode Victor Olusola, a Catholic secondary school, Eucharistic Heart of Jesus Model College (EHJMC), Ilorin, displayed 30 photographs of its students, who scored between 355 and 300 marks out of 400 obtainable marks in the same UTME. These children are between the ages of 15 and 17. Sadly, our Minister of Education said these ones are “too young” to be in the university. This is one of the reasons why in the year 2024, Nigeria still imports plastic toothpicks and calls it ‘dental floss’ to give it ostentatious status! How do we match up to a country, which 115 years ago rose above age limitation to accommodate the best from its educational system when in the mid-21st century, we still consider our 16-year-olds as “too young” to be admitted into our universities irrespective of their performances at the qualifying examinations?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Mike Adenuga’s 71 Resilient Steps

Most embarrassing from the minister is his allusion to the 6-3-3-4 system of education as a solution to the ‘immaturity’ of young undergraduates. To the best of my ignorance, Nigeria moved from the 6-3-3-4, to the current 9-3-4 system in 2004. That was when the State Primary Education Board (SPEB) changed to State Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEB) across the states. By that change, primary and junior secondary (first nine years) came under SUBEB. Is the minister not aware of that, such that he would still be relying on a policy that was changed 20 years ago? This is one of the problems we have as a nation. The quality of the mental ability of those who superintend over every segment of our life speaks volumes. Granted that there is illiteracy in the land, but must our policy makers also be ignorant of the correct policies in their ministries and departments? Is anyone still wondering why we have not been able to make any headway? Can we get the respected Professor Oloyede of JAMB to whisper to the minister that his position on the age requirement for admission into tertiary institutions is wrong, and the minister should not mislead the children to think that they are below the constitutionally prescribed age? Such a bland announcement by the minister is capable of sending some children to depression.

It is gratifying to note that our fainéant senate is rising to the occasion, this time around, to curtail the pre-historic thinking of Minister Mamman on the age limit for admission into our universities. Senator Adeyemi Adaramodu, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, was quoted to have described the stance of the minister as “just an opinion.” It had better be! Adaramodu, according to the reports, said that any adjustments to the age limit for admission into our universities would require proper legislative procedures, adding that if such a matter was brought before the senate, “there is going to be a public hearing. All the stakeholders will sit down and talk about it – the parents, teachers, legislators, civil society organisations, even foreign organisations.” Should the issue come up for debate in the National Assembly, I commend the two chambers to take the wisdom of Professor Dipo Kolawole, former Vice Chancellor, Ekiti State University, Ado Ekiti, who, while faulting Minister Mamman, said: “With global advancement in medicine, science and technology, age is no more a major determinant of capacity to cope with higher education but depth of knowledge. It is sheer backwardness to measure maturity principally on the basis of age.” Describing the minister’s position as “absurd” and “repulsive”, Kolawole posited that: “In America, China and others, people now obtain PhD at relatively young age. They are immediately recruited and deposited in their research laboratories and institutes to enhance technological advancement of their countries in a competitive world of science and technology.” One can only hope that Mamman, and many of his ilk, would be conscious enough to know that the world has moved beyond the level they are. Rather than depriving brilliant children of admission to tertiary institutions on account of their ages, the government should develop policies that would make the universities to grow to the level that they would begin to make “provision for your (their) welfare”, of Mamman’s “too young” undergraduates. It is wrong for Nigeria to keep engaging the reverse gear while other nations of the world are moving at supersonic speed.

The writer, Mr. Suyi Ayodele is a senior journalist, South-South/South-East Editor, Nigerian Tribune and a columnist in the same newspaper. This article was first published by Nigerian Tribune. It is published here with permission from the author.