U-18 admission ban: It is a senseless policy, says SDP’s Adebayo

By Folorunso Alagbede, Abuja

The Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman’s recent announcement of a ban on admission for candidates under the age of 18 into tertiary institutions in the country has continued to generate mixed reactions from Nigerians

While some have commended the government’s effort to ensure that underage students are not admitted into universities, others have expressed concerns about the potential consequences of this policy.

Among those who expressed reservations about the policy is Prince Adewole Adebayo, who said the policy announcement was senseless as it didn’t go through a thorough process.

According to the leader and presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party SDP in the 2023 general election, “how can you come out and say that a kid who is brilliant cannot go to the university because he is not 18 years old? When I got admission to study law at the University of Ife, I was 17 years old.

“So, many of these new policies that they are bringing out now don’t make sense and these are all the things that make people think that this government is not thinking through many of their processes and the life experiences that people have.

“It is not a political slur to say you don’t have credibility; what it means is that people are not following you. You are on your own, even though you are supposed to lead all of us into prosperity”, he said.

Adebayo also poked on the ostentatious lifestyles of government officials, including President Tinubu, whom he claimed asked Nigerians to tighten their belts but refused to lead by example. Instead, they are living large, which, according to him, makes the people angry.

His words, “People are annoyed that you are living a very large life. If you are tightening the belt around the waist, that could be a waist trainer, and they can tell you how to consume less. But you can not tighten the belt around the neck of the people, in which case they will not be able to breathe.

“The things that are going up for the poor are the things that are not discretionary. There are a lot of crises that are facing this country that we monitor on a daily basis, that the government doesn’t even seem to be aware of, and that is what is worrisome. They need to wake up”, he said.

Adebayo said he is one of those who don’t want the government to fail, but the officials’ actions so far point to the direction of not only failing but also unseating itself.

“I don’t want them to fail, and my intention is not to unseat them because they are already unseating themselves by their own efforts. So you don’t even need to unseat them because they are unseating themselves.

“My feeling is that they don’t intend to come back because the way they are behaving is the feeling of somebody who knows that he is not going to come back. They are behaving like one chance”, he said.