By Nathaniel Zacchaeus, Abuja
The Senate yesterday declared that the 16-year age requirement for applicants seeking admission to tertiary institutions in the country has not been changed.
The upper chamber maintained that the comments indicating an upward review of the age limit to 18 years were personal opinions.
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Adeyemi Adaramodu, stated this in an interview with journalists yesterday.
The upper chamber clarified that any downward or upward review of the age limit can only be carried out through legislation that must follow due process.
The Senate spokesperson maintained that nothing would be done on the minimum age requirement for tertiary institutions until all the stakeholders in the education sector endorse it.
Adaramodu said, “That comment on the minimum age requirement for admission is not a law. So it is just an opinion. It’s not a law. By the time the Senate resumes, whoever wants to bring that one out to make it a law, will now bring it and then the procedures will take place.
“You can bring whatever to the floor in the form of a bill. When you bring it, there’s 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.
“We will sit down and we talk. Even if they say that the minimum age should be 30 or 12 we will all discuss it at an open forum. So it’s still a comment which cannot be taken to be the law.”
He described as untrue, insinuations that the Minister of Education had instructed the leadership of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board not to release results of applicants below 18 years.
The Minister of Education, Prof Tahir Mamman, had last week disclosed that the Federal Government planned to review and peg the minimum entry age into tertiary institutions in the country at 18 years.
The Minister gave the hint while monitoring the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in Abuja.
Mamman advised parents against pushing their children and wards “too much,” to allow them to attain some level of maturity to be able to better manage their affairs.
He had said, “The other thing which we notice is the age of those who have applied to go to the university. Some of them are too young. We are going to look at it because they are too young to understand what a university education is all about.
“That’s the stage when students migrate from a controlled environment where they are in charge of their 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, and 16, going to the examination. It is not good for us. Parents should be encouraged not to push their wards, or children too much,” he said.
Members of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) also on Tuesday last week declared their support for the move by the Federal Government to peg the minimum entry age into tertiary institutions in the country at 18 years.
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund, Senator Muntari Dandutse, spoke when he led other members of the committee as well as its House of Representatives counterpart on monitoring the ongoing UTME in some examination centres as the lawmakers’ oversight function.
Dandutse said the Senate would support every effort by the government to streamline admission processes, especially the area of minimum age qualification for entry into tertiary institutions in the country.
