The dust raised by the result of this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) is yet to settle, and it appears we will not be hearing the last of the furore anytime soon as more information comes to light. After initially ascribing the mass failure recorded in the examination this year to a lack of brilliance and preparedness on the part of the students, the Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB), the body tasked with conducting UTME, has now admitted that the widespread failure recorded in this year’s UTME was not due to the academic performance of the students but technical glitches that affected some examination centres.
The JAMB registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, in a fit of contrition, during a press conference on Wednesday, took responsibility for what happened and apologised to the affected children and their parents. He even wept for good measure; whether the tears are genuine or performative is another topic. We must commend Oloyede for owning up to JAMB’s mistake and for the admission of error. In a nation where publicly admitting to dereliction of duty, sloppiness and being at fault is a rarity, his action was bold, honest and exemplary. But Oloyede’s apology and penitence cannot become the broom with which JAMB oversight, mistakes and underwhelming performance will be swept under the proverbial carpet.
157 centres out of the 887 centres in the 2025 UTME suffered a technical glitch, JAMB disclosed. The board has now said that 379,997 candidates in the five states of the eastern region and Lagos, affected by the glitches, will have the chance to retake the exam. But this may not be enough. There are hard and tough questions Oloyede and his men have to answer. Answering these questions will go a long way in not only restoring public confidence in the board but also affirming its ability to conduct and oversee an examination that is a requirement for university education in Nigeria.
JAMB owning up to its mistakes and errors wasn’t done of its own volition or without external pressure. It took the outrage of livid Nigerians on social media, the displeasure of dissatisfied stakeholders and the protest of disconcerted parents for JAMB to walk back on its earlier statement that the results were an actual reflection of the students’ performance and that it stood by it. Recall that shortly after the results were announced and parents shared their reservations about some of the results, the JAMB registrar cobbled up a press conference where he tongue-lashed and berated the parents for voicing their concerns over the conduct of the examinations. He called them names and asked them to provide evidence of sloppiness and poor conduct of the examination. As if on cue, JAMB also took to their X page to disparage those who pointed out shoddiness and lapses in how the examination was conducted. The minister of education, Tunji Alausa, in his own element, took the game of blame appropriation a notch higher. He, without any shred of hard proof, claimed the massive failure was due to the potency and efficiency of the anti-cheating measures put in place by the board.
It took the threat of litigation for the examination body to change the sound of its melody and recant its initial stance. Even worrisome is the subtle and infantile attempts to distance itself from the debacle with a statement whose opening read like the musing of a troubled middle-aged man. The fallout of the whole imbroglio and the latest information that has come to light introduced a new angle and unearthed a slew of unproven but somewhat plausible assertions. The claims of academic sabotage from truculent conspiracy theorists who hinged their assertions on the fact that students from the South East geopolitical zone are disproportionately affected by the technical glitch have gained traction on social media. JAMB’s statement has not done much to disprove these claims.
According to JAMB, it discovered some lapses and anomalies in its system, which it described as ‘omission’, on the second day of the examinations this year, which was Friday, April 25, 2025. By the time this discovery was made and the issue was fixed, hundreds of thousands of students had already written the examination. After the issue was resolved, JAMB didn’t think it was necessary to inform the public about it and let those who wrote their examination before it was discovered and addressed know that they would likely be affected by the ‘omission’. JAMB went ahead to release the results of the examination, including those affected by the technical glitch. When the release of the results was met with public opprobrium as many students and stakeholders cast doubt on the authenticity of some of the results, JAMB did not immediately open up about what happened in the first two days of the examination. Instead, it took umbrage at the public’s questioning of its capacity to conduct a hitch-free examination. It doubled down on its claims of the examination being conducted in line with global best practices and that the abysmal performance of many who sat for the examination is not the fault of the board but the student because its system is fail-safe.
After noticing that the public pressure on it would not let up, it eventually admitted that a technical glitch on its part contributed to the widespread poor performance and low score. The admission came nine days after it released the results during which it was compelled to open up its system for external auditing and assessment. So the question is, if JAMB knew there was a technical glitch that affected the performance of many students, why did it keep such vital and critical information from the public before releasing the results? Why did it release the results of those affected by the system error, knowing full well that the results of the affected students would not reflect their performance during the examination? And why did the board embark on a windy rigmarole of denial, gaslighting, and apportioning of blame? It took the strident voice of discontented Nigerians before the board came clean, and coming clean after you’ve been caught pants down is not coming clean. There should be more by way of punishment for those indicted in the debacle, especially now that it has been established that the technical glitch was a result of a human error because the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for LAG (Lagos and South-East zones) inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers.
This kind of heart-rending oversight and mistake can’t be atoned for by a moment of contrition on television. Heads will have to roll. The technical personnel whose duty was to update the delivery servers but failed to do so must be made to know that such grave dereliction of duty is unacceptable and should be punished accordingly. Someone must tell Oloyede that a show of penitence in front camera won’t cut it. If Nigeria were to be a country where consequences for actions are a thing, many people at JAMB would be out of jobs by now. If Nigeria were not a country steeped in perennial and inexplicable ‘anyhowness’, Oloyede would have resigned without anyone asking. Sally Collier – UK exam regulator – resigned in 2020 when a controversial algorithm downgraded students’ marks.
From the information in the public domain and the startling revelation occasioned by the furore, especially as it regards the South East being majorly affected by the system error, would it be wrong to use the Minister’s comments to infer that the moves to curb examination malpractices were targeted at a particular region? According to Alex Onyia of Edu-care, the man whose irrepressible voice played a key role in exposing the ineptitude of JAMB, the report that Anambra and Lagos state lead in UTME malpractices is false. Onyia also disclosed that it is one vendor that manages the LAG cluster. The states under the cluster are; Enugu, Imo, Ebonyi, Abia, Anambra, Lagos, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Niger, Kogi and FCT. This disclosure will only feed into the notion that there was clear sabotage and deliberate targeting of the South East. It beggars belief that the same vendor under whose jurisdiction falls a clutch of northern States and the entire Southeast failed to ensure that the delivery servers for the five Southeast states were updated but did not forget to update servers used by the northern States under his cluster. That’s pretty convenient. Probing this vendor will not be enough; those who lead the institution that condones such irresponsibility must have their feet held to the fire.
Another thing is Oloyede’s show of remorse or acknowledgement of his incompetence will not bring back the life of the teenager who killed herself because of her poor performance in the examination. Giving the affected students a chance to retake the exams is neither here nor there, especially when the students had to write the exam two days after he publicly admitted to the board being at fault for their academic travails. Examination is both an intellectual and a psychological activity. After preparing for an examination, all the conditions have to be right and the mood perfect on the examination day for one to get the best out of the process. The students have not been afforded this luxury.
We’ve heard the vaunted story of how upstanding and forthright Oloyede is. He has been touted as a quintessential intellectual and consummate administrator with an unblemished record. He must now decide whether he wants to continue on this road where the current episode defines his legacy and besmirches his hard-won reputation, or he would take the other road, the one less travelled by Nigerians in public offices but beset on both sides by honour and dignity. The one that will require him to resign, bow out while the lights are on and save what is left of his battered image and that of the institution he leads.
Whichever road he chooses to tread and stay on, one thing that many will agree on is that a teary apology won’t be enough, and anything short of his resignation would amount to undoing years of sterling and impeccable accomplishment and an insult to the sensibilities of Nigerians.