Some months ago, without an act of parliament, the minister of education decreed that henceforth admission to higher institutions and to universities in particular henceforth will be for children 18 years and above. There was no reason given for this peremptory decision and it was not subject to debate or respect to the existing situation where each university decided the age limit of students to be admitted.
In civilised democratic countries, this decision would have been debated and based on experience and logic, but in our case where those in authority usually arrogate all powers to themselves as if they were omniscient and all-knowing in every respect. Yet this ministry had in its files policy on exceptional and gifted children put in place when Professor Jibril Muhammad Aminu, an erudite and brilliant cardiologist and administrator held fort at the ministry of education. There was even an embryonic policy to create special schools for gifted children to facilitate their cerebral development and consequent contribution to the pool of knowledge which the country can tap into.
As usual in Nigeria, we always try to reinvent the spinning wheel as if we were just beginning in our journey of development. We always have huge budget on construction of things like roads, railways, harbours, buildings, universities, hospitals just anything has to be started from the beginning. There is usually no stock-taking of what exists and how it can be fixed if it is not working. Politicians and apparently their civil servant advisers are not interested in repairs and reforms or refurbishment. This is because of the humongous amounts that would be allocated for new construction and what percentage would be available for sharing and this is what has gotten us to our parlous predicament.
I have good news for our minister of education and his advisers. As I write, a 16-year old Nigerian girl, Esther Okade born in 2006 to a mother who is a mathematician, Omanefe Okade and Paul Okade has just gotten a PhD in mathematics at the age of 16 in an English university. This prodigy of a child at three years old was solving quadratic equations at six. Esther passed ordinary level examination at age seven and Cambridge University offered her admission to their undergraduate program in mathematics. The parents demurred but enrolled her in distant learning college or the Open University. At that age of 10, she was the youngest university student in England and by 13, she graduated first class in financial mathematics and now at 16, the young girl has gotten a doctorate in mathematics.
She is also an author, writing books in algebra for children with titles like “yummy yummy algebra” and with the support of her parents, she founded a school in Nigeria’s Delta State called the “Shakespeare Academy” where traditional subjects in the sciences, mathematics, English and liberal arts, ethics, etiquette and public speaking are taught to young children. Her story as an English commentator said has demonstrated that “genius is not age-specific; from solving quadratic mathematics as a toddler at age of three and bagging a PhD in financial mathematics at the age of 16, Esther has told the world that all things are possible if talents are encouraged and nurtured”.
This is the story of a 16-year old girl in a liberal environment and not subjected to administrative and unreasonable diktat because of hidden political reasons designed to level everybody down rather than pulling everybody up.
Is it not therefore strange to my readers that in a country where policies are made to cater for slow learning people rather than to extraordinary people, what you get is what we are getting in governance today where we don’t seem to know how to make use of God-given endowment to attain the level of development expected of us as species of Homo sapiens?
There are brilliant and gifted children and adults everywhere in this country. Academic brilliance is not restricted to any region or ethnic or religious group as some people tend to feel. From my more than 55 years of being in university education I know this. I also know from personal history of my family and those whose paths crossed mine in the past. At the age of 16+ my late brother, Oluwakayode Osuntokun had passed out of Christ’s School Ado Ekiti with distinctions in all subjects but English where he got a credit score. For years to come, this remained the enviable record until George Fola Esan equalled the feat and their performances was shown to us younger people what was possible. The two gentlemen later in life became globally known physicians in Neurology and Haematology at very young g age. Kayode got all the degrees available in medicine and the prizes in his field climaxing it with invitation to Royal Hammersmith College Hospital as first black visiting professor and subsequently examining in the Royal College of Medicine membership examination. The sterling performance of Osuntokun and Esan was replicated by Jibril Aminu’s performance in Barewa College, Zaria and later in life as a cardiologist. Omololu Olunloyo has done the same thing in Mathematics at a very young age and graduated in his class as the best student in the entire Commonwealth. Animalu has performed the same feat in Engineering Mathematics in an American university. The country did not wait for slow runners to run at the same speed with these academic heroes. Life is an individual race and we run at different paces because we are individual subjects in the hands of the grand author of life, the Almighty God. The Imafidon children in England are no less distinguished in their precocious performance as brilliant children. The Imafidon family is said to “be the brainiest family in the world”. It is a family of seven. The first children were twins, Peter and Paula achieving ordinary level qualifications at the age of nine and entering University of Cambridge, while their sister, Christine by the age of 14 had a Master’s degree in mathematics at Oxford University where she was retained as a lecturer. The other children have continued to distinguish themselves in sports and academics usually before expected age of maturity. If these examples were in Nigeria, they would have been caught in the administrative web of government regulations.
I am not disputing the fact that maturity and education go together but not necessarily in every case. This is why I am advocating that administrative regulations in the case under consideration have to be broad and flexible. I have no problems with having general policies for admission but it must be advisory in nature and not like a sword of Damocles hanging on everyone.
If I were a legal professional, I would go to court but I don’t have money to hire a brilliant lawyer to argue the case of those of us who believe government should be an enabler in our lives not a hindrance or hurdles we need to scale over. I asked publicly that Femi Falana the peripatetic public defender should take my case up. I wonder that with all the enveloping problems besetting this government, restraining young people from going to universities at whatever age if they pass the entrance examination, should be the least worry of this government.
