Rotimi Fasan
This year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, suffered a hiccup that had a knock-on effect on the remaining examinations slated through the week of the examination. Since many of the exams could not start at the scheduled time, they had to be rescheduled for the following hours and days. The situation left many candidates and their anxious parents frustrated as it must have staff of JAMB led by the indefatigable Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede.
A couple of days later, JAMB released the statistics of the casualties of that first day mishap: no less than 60, 000 candidates were affected by the system failure that was put down to technical glitches. These, going by previous experience, were often caused by poor internet connectivity among other electronically-generated troubles. The affected candidates had to go through what one might call “supplementary” examination to borrow a term from the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
More than a week since the exams were conducted not much has been heard from Nigerians concerning the technical glitches that affected them or the pain caused candidates, their parents and other stakeholders like teachers, school proprietors and others who had control of the examination centres. We are yet to see placard-carrying activists, entertainers or hired thugs complaining about the treatment meted out to the candidates; blaming Abuja for poor governance or the parlous state of internet connectivity in the country. Nor have we heard talks about the amount that JAMB has spent organising the exams to ensure they were hitch-free.
We have, indeed, not heard Nigerians lamenting that technical failure that affected the lives of thousands of young people, the likes of which we were told made up a huge chunk of the ranks of followers of a political party that has been making so much soap and lather out of the failure of INEC to transmit results of the February 25 elections under circumstances similar to what JAMB experienced.
Members of this so-called movement that turned itself into an online lynch mob have not had anything to say about what happened to the matriculation exams or the candidates that directly bore the brunt of the glitches that delayed the exams. For them and others of their political tribe, this is not the kind of emotionally-charged issue any two-penny activist could latch on to gain self-serving national attention.
As far as they are concerned, it would appear this was an isolated issue that had no bearing to the concerns that have animated their rejection of the outcome of the February 2023 Presidential and National Assembly elections which they claimed were rigged against their candidates mainly on grounds that the results were not transmitted electronically as promised by INEC.
UTME are computer-based tests, so-called CBT, that are conducted entirely electronically. It is the pact JAMB has with Nigerians who apply for higher education through its agency. But due to technical glitches that we are all too familiar with in our part of the world, the exam could not go ahead as earlier scheduled and advertised. Yet heaven did not fall and has not fallen since.
The Board that has been noted for its relative sterling performance, at least since 2016 or thereabouts after its present Registrar took over, could not go on with the exams as planned. Within a couple of hours, however, it rose to the occasion, rescheduled the exams and went ahead to do what it had been known for. My point, now, is that we have not heard Nigerians, particularly the political mobsters, making what happened with the exams a matter of national discourse. It’s as if nothing happened yet we are talking here of what touches the life of over 1.6 million young Nigerians that registered for the exams.
These are people Nigerians, in moments of effusive praise, like to call leaders of tomorrow. Neither the partisans of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and especially the Labour Party, LP, have had anything to say about the glitches that hobbled the UTM exams in the few hours after they were scheduled to start last week. The outraged mob and online Alsatians that have policed political discussions before, during and after the elections, have not looked in the direction of the UTME. None of them have set twitter on fire with their riotous protestations.
They have not taken JAMB to task concerning its failure to deliver on its standing mandate of ensuring a hitch-free examination nor has any one of their members, perhaps parents of some of the affected UTME candidates, shown any inclination to reject the results when they are released simply because JAMB failed to either forestall or anticipate the technical glitches that all but ruined the exams for thousands of the candidates even when they still have JAMB’s promise that they would be allowed to sit the exams no matter the degree of disruptions caused by the glitches.
One is not by this saying that JAMB ought to be made the object of mass attack. Far from it! For one, as I have pointed out above, JAMB under Ishaq Oloyede has made tremendous improvements in its conduct and management of the UTME. The Registrar has run a regime of transparency and accountability that his predecessors in office didn’t make the slightest pretence about. He has been able to safeguard and improve the integrity of the exams with his emplacement of foolproof measures that have curtailed malpractices. He has blacklisted exam centres and supervisors, including JAMB staff, suspected or found guilty of perpetrating exam malpractice.
JAMB under Oloyede has had its revenue base raised beyond what anyone in government could have imagined. Overall, it has been a tale of incremental but positive growth for JAMB during the tenure of Prof. Oloyede. But some of the issues it continues to grapple with, particularly those connected to electricity and ICT, among others, have lasted for many years now. They are perennial challenges the body, like others in the private and public sectors, has had to contend with.
Rather than see the technical problems that affected INEC’s performance during the 2023 elections as part of the general challenges of everyday Nigerian life that would have to be tamed for Nigeria to develop, critics of INEC chose to see it as an isolated event tailor-made to rig the elections. It would be naive to imagine that the technical challenges JAMB faced during the latest round of examinations were proof of its lack of preparedness. As with JAMB, so with INEC. Any criticism of INEC or rejection of the 2023 elections because INEC failed to transmit the results electronically is at best a misreading of the situation or at worst a political take on a national problem of infrastructural deficit.
