THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the body that oversees admissions into Nigeria’s higher institutions, is in the eye of the storm over certain glitches that marred this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). The examination, which over 75 per cent of the reported 2,030,627 candidates failed woefully, was marred by the technical maladies in the South-East states and Lagos and the Board led by the much (and justly) celebrated Professor Ishaq Oloyede has taken the noble route of owning up to its errors and scheduling a re-sit for the victims of the glitches. Fantastic.
Reacting to the mass failure in an uncritical, highly limited posture, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, said it was evidence of the success that the government and the examination bodies had made in combating examination malpractice. Hear him: “JAMB has put so much security in place that fraud or cheating has been completely eliminated. Now, we don’t have the same in our other exams, like WAEC and NECO. From November of this year, WAEC and NECO will migrate their exams to computer-based testing. We have to use technology to fight this fraud.”
To be sure, Alausa missed the point by miles. Exam malpractice has been fought over the years, and one of the most revolutionary measures by the Board under its immediate past leadership was the compartmentalization of the exam into types, a novelty that prevented candidates from communicating and dictating answers to one another in the exam hall, as Candidate A’s Question 1 could be Candidate B’s Question 49. Besides, mass failure is the norm, not the exception, in the UTME examination, and speaks to the crisis in Nigeria’s education sector, of which dismal UTME results is only a small part. The UTME is a computer-based exam but there isn’t anything close to computer literacy in most public and private schools in the country where students have never even touched a desktop or laptop all their lives, meaning that poor mastery of the computer is a significant factor in the mass failure. But that’s by the way. CBT ought to be school culture, not exam culture, and the utter ineptitude of Nigeria’s governmental structure that sees public examinations as revenue spinners couldn’t be more evident. And I hope to goodness that in following JAMB’s CBT mode, Dr Alausa and his ministry don’t eliminate theory questions from WAEC/NECO, turning candidates into gamblers (reciting tokini tokeji) in the exam hall. You can answer theoretical questions online, but no one who has a bit of reflection can claim that Nigeria’s secondary schools and its SSIII students are ready for this.
The foregoing is, of course, by the way. My real interest in this piece is to deplore the Federal Government’s new, mercantilist approach that focuses on JAMB as a massive revenue spinner while callously failing to invest in the examination infrastructure and advance the cause of education. Because of the alleged massive corruption in which JAMB’s previous leadership under Dibu Ojerinde was embroiled, it has been fashionable in the last few years to harp on the regime of integrity that Oloyede and his team have instituted. I am on the same page with those lauding Oloyede for his honesty and integrity, but that’s not my point here. My point is that the government, riding on Oloyede’s honesty horse, has been taking and taking from the Nigerian public and refusing to give nothing in return, with the effect that the UTME has been marred by so many technical issues over the years without any solutions.
Some 2,030,627 candidates registered for this year’s UTME, which cost N8700 per candidate with the mock exam included, and N7200 without it. If all the candidates used the full option, then JAMB made N17.67 billion. If, on the other hand, all the candidates chose to eliminate the mock option, then JAMB made approximately N14.62 billion. My point, then, is that the government having seen how much revenue JAMB can actually bring in with a honest leadership, has callously shelved its responsibility of investing in the upgrade of the examination and lessening the pain that candidates and their parents go through. Whatever money JAMB makes is taken from poor, struggling parents, and it’s quite criminal to focus on this revenue while ignoring the persistent cries over the drawbacks experienced during the examination. In other words, just like the FRSC which was once dreaded by motorists but is now a toothless bulldog even though it now makes more money than it has ever done, JAMB has lost its lustre amid public accolades and made itself a nightmare for candidates and their parents.
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Millions of candidates take the UME every year, but only a few succeed in gaining admission into higher institutions. For instance, in 2022, 1.3 million candidates out of the 1.7 million who sat the exam failed. That’s 78 per cent failure. In 2024, the figure was 76 per cent. But the government which rakes in so much money from the poor candidates has not spent a dime on upgrading UTME infrastructure. The result is that in these terrible times when kidnappers are always on the prowl, especially at dawn, many candidates, most of them actually underage, are require to leave their homes as early as 5 a.m, because they must be at the exam hall by 7a.m. That’s why many parents choose to drive or accompany them to the centres. Insecurity is everywhere. Many of the time, candidates miss their exams because of the distant locations they are posted to, and technical issues also result in candidates getting different/poor results for the same exam. Just like Nigeria experienced the modernization and recapitalization of the banking system under Chukwuma Soludo with the return to civil rule in 1999, then experienced an anti-corruption fight under Lamido Sanusi, however political, JAMB has also moved from modernization to anti-corruption. But these shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. That’s down to the government, and it is failing spectacularly.
If the government were really serious about alleviating the plight of candidates, it would either have built CBT centres or, more realistically in my own view, fostered an arrangement whereby JAMB would make the country’s higher institutions its major CBT centres at a level not currently envisaged, using their resources. Since the government owns both the OAU, Ile-Ife, and JAMB, for instance, it can create an arrangement where, for the purpose of the UTME, there are CBT centres in far more locations on the campus than you have currently. In that case, JAMB would not need to build CBT centres everywhere, but could have like 25,000 candidates writing the exam at a polytechnic where, say, only 5,000 currently do.
Besides, it is common knowledge that in the United States, standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are owned and run by private companies, just like in the UK, where boards like AQA, OCR and Edexcel are independent organizations. And that leads inevitably to the question of the essence of JAMB itself as the sole determiner of admissions in Nigeria. Since Nigeria is a federation, why not democratize admission to higher institutions? Why not have a South-South version of JAMB, say?
I remember the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the chief promoter of education as a revolutionary tool in Nigeria. Key aspects of his views on education include universal access, state-led development, progressive social legislation, and emphasis on social welfare. Today, it’s all about the “government magic” (as the Abami Eda, Fela, would say) of making money from parents. Gross!
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