•Speaks on why he sued JAMB
Human rights lawyer and activist, Evans Ufeli, in this interview by SAM NWAOKO, speaks on why he sued the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and on the gale of defections in the Nigerian polity.
In the larger polity, the only party that appears to be stable now is the ruling party and that is where everybody is trooping to. It is so much that some people have expressed fear of Nigeria degenerating to a one-party state. As a lawyer, what would you say about defectors who still retain their positions regardless of what the constitution says?
Section 58 and Section 109 of the 1999 constitution have made provisions on this, but the positions are not self-executory. If you defect from your political party to another political party, your seat is supposed to be declared vacant because it is the political party that sponsored you to that place. If you cannot prove that there is disharmony or discord in your political party, you should not defect unless you can prove. It is not self-executory because even if you defect somebody has to go to court to enforce that vacancy. It has to be enforced. We have cases in court as we speak.
That is for lawmakers?
It is not only lawmakers that are defecting. Governors too are defecting; my own state governor, Delta State, the governor, the deputy governor and many of them defected. This I vehemently condemned and which I am joining forces with others in a suit by the PDP against the governor of Delta State to challenge this. Remember that in Celestine Omehia versus RotimiAmaechi and INEC, the court said that it is the political party that contests, wins or loses elections. If it is the political party that wins or loses elections, on the basis of that precedence, even though the constitution is silent on the defection of a governor, that case between Celestine Omehia and Amaechi can be used as a precedence in the defection of a governor. He cannot switch allegiance overnight and expect that it is morally correct and legally okay. The PDP has said they would test it in court, especially that of Delta State and I am in the case and I am behind them. I am interested in this because we have different kinds of laws; we have statutes in which a law states what will happen. We also have laws that are made by the judiciary itself. It is called judicial precedence or case law, and part of our case law in Nigeria has to do with the case of Celestine Omehia versus Rotimi Amaechi and INEC, where a court proclaimed and made Amaechi, who did not even contest election, a governor. If we rely on that precedence, if a political party wins or loses an election, it therefore means that if a governor had won an election on the platform of a political party, he cannot take that victory and that mandate to another political party unchallenged. It should be challenged. That is my position.
What informed the lawsuit which you instituted against the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) after what seems to be a reprieve with their public apology?
When the news broke that only 25 percent of the candidates who sat for the 2025 UTME scored 200, I knew there was a problem. So, I called my legal team – my law firm and we went into research. We looked at the results five years backward and we came up with a resolution that something technical must have happened because nothing had changed between last year and this year that would have disintegrate the intellection of students who registered for that exam to the point where the outcome would be that drastic. We noticed that this year’s own, not only were there irregularities, there were dysfunctionalities that were uncalled for. Students were asked to write exams by 6am – to come that early whereas in some of the centres, the exam didn’t start until 2pm or 3pm. Midway into the exam in some centers, students were logged out of the system and they were not able to log in again and so many other complaints. Some candidates were reported to have gone missing because of the timing and because of the way it was disorganised and so on. These are 15/16-year-old students. So at the end of the day, the objective of JAMB is to test students’ preparedness for tertiary institutions, their intellectual prowess and their capacity to cope with tertiary education Nigeria. But you will discover that JAMB left the objective and is testing the children on other things entirely. When they tested the children in this last exam was their ability to absorb stress, chaos, disorientation and disorganisation. So, a student who got to a centre by 6am and exam did not commence until very late and those who missed their way were already disorganised. So, their intellection couldn’t have been tested and we attributed that to the low performance.
We also attributed to the fact that not only that the students were coming out from stress and exhaustion, we found that a lot of students who got high scores last year but couldn’t get admission wrote the exam this year scored very low marks. Some candidates did the exam last year, scored 266 and this year, they did the same exam and scored 155 – not one, not two or three. They got very high score last year but could not be admitted for the course of their choice, came back to write again and failed. There were also those who were allowed to register for the exam but were told afterwards that they were underage and therefore, they had no result. That is discrimination.
To the law, according to the Child Rights Act, children are not to be discriminated against. You cannot collect money from children, waste their time and energy and get them exhausted and all that, and at the end of the day you tell them that they do not have results because they are underage. That is discrimination. The Child Rights Act provides that every child must be held in high esteem and not to be discriminated against, and not to be put under dehumanising condition. When you look at the Nigerian constitution also, the fundamental human rights as enshrined in Chapter 4 of the 1999 constitution empowers these children with requisite rights and authorities to access education. The right to education is that of the Nigerian child. All these were violated by JAMB’s policy and the rest of that. You cannot make a policy that overrides the constitution.
So, because we saw the public injury, public outcry and the reason the judiciary exists in the society is to serve as the watchdog for the common man. The judiciary is the last hope of the common man and so we wrote a notice which was published by some media houses, that we were issuing them a notice to review the result. We called that the entire result be set aside and another exam be conducted. Part of demands were met yesterday when JAMB reviewed the result and came up with the fact that over 397,000 candidates in about five or six states were affected, including Lagos and therefore they are going to rewrite the exam.
That is not even what we are asking for but we saw it as partly what we are saying but that is not what we are asking for. We are asking that the entire exam be set aside and another should be conducted. JAMB is supposed to be an examination body for tertiary institutions has recently turned to a revenue-generating authority. So, JAMB cannot say that they do not have the money to organise a fresh exam on a clean slate. Therefore we called that the exam be set aside.
But when they did not do that, we had to file that suit to ensure that the students get respite, so that, for the injury inflicted on them they would get adequate redress. That is the reason for the suit. It is not to cast aspersion on JAMB or to vilify anyone, but to establish that the Nigerian students have a right under the law. It was filed for fairness, because there is no fairness, there is no equity there is no justice in the conduct of that exam and the same cannot stand because it is repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience.
JAMB met some of the demands you placed before it, you said. If you now demand total remedy, what would that be in clear terms: conduct of another exam free of charge?
Our first prayer in the lawsuit is that the exam conducted by JAMB so far be set aside and a fresh one be conducted. Yes, it has to be free of charge because the students have already paid. It was due to no fault of theirs that it was messed up. So what JAMB ought to do is to order them to go and reprint their photo card or their exam documents and JAMB should fix a date in the future and then set exams for the entire country. They have to do that. They cannot say they don’t have the wherewithal to do that because they are declaring billions of Naira in profit for the federal government.
But the Registrar of JAMB, Professor Is’haq Oloyede apologised on behalf of JAMB for the technical glitches and even shed tears, and you are still not assuaged. Don’t you fear a backlash in which people might ask what else you want after an apology?
Apology is not remedy. Apology will not placate the situation. It is remedy that is needed, you don’t just apologise, you have to ameliorate the situation. Nobody is after Oloyede, I don’t know him in person and I have no business with him. I don’t have to fight the case if he had done the right thing. He didn’t do the right thing so it is expected that we will contest issues like these and make it known to the Nigerian public that such malfeasance should not stand. If I had anything against him, I would be calling for his resignation. There are people calling for that, I don’t believe in that. He is a father, he knows what exactly what this means to the children. Do you know that someone committed suicide a few days ago on this issue in Ikorodu, and you are saying apology should settle it? If apology is it, what about the girl that has lost her life? What about her parents, her siblings and so on? There must be a lawsuit; there must be compensation.
You sued for N10billion. That’s a very handsome amount of money. What is the money intended for? Who would be the beneficiaries of this money if you win this suit?
Of course JAMB has a list of all the candidates that took part in the examination. It is public knowledge that those who took part in the exams would be the beneficiaries of that if the case is concluded in our favour. It is not for the law firm or anybody there, it is the students – the aggrieved party. That is what it is.
The fire of human rights activism appears to be waning seriously in the country. It is no longer like it used to be during the days of Gani Fawehinmi and co. Do you see it as such, and what do you think is the reason for this?
Every generation has its own temperament and order. The cosmic energy in the administration of the universe actually depletes and defines every generation. So, the lawyers of today are not exactly going to act like the lawyers of yore because times are different. The priorities today are different from what the priorities were in yesteryears. Every generation will also retain its prophets, its clergy, its advocates, its activists and its lawyers and so on. They will retain theirs but they may not play it as exactly as the generation before them. So, it is a cosmic issue, it is the echo system that gives the rendering not by human contemplation or human comparison that actually defines the process. It is by what the universe allows, that is exactly what is going on. It is alignment. Today cannot be like yesterday and yesterday cannot be like today.
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