UTME, OLOYEDE’S TEARS AND SOUTHEAST CANDIDATES

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By the time this essay is published, candidates from Lagos and Southeast Nigeria billed to rewrite the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam would probably have started receiving their result notifications and have some relief from Prof. Ishaq Oloyede’s initial ‘human error’ that has left most of them traumatized and suicidal; an error with long-lasting effects on its victims but which Oloyede hoped to wash away with his tears of forced penitence.

This ugly episode which would have denied otherwise qualified candidates, especially those from the southeast, admission to higher institutions of learning would have been more easily pardonable if it was the first time Oloyede’s JAMB was showing inexplicable bias against candidates of southeast origin.

With Oloyede’s past outbursts about candidates from the southeast, it suggests that the JAMB Registrar is on a mission to help those envious of the educational exploits of NdIgbo obliterate one of their greatest assets and strengths in a country where the system has already been deliberately orchestrated to stunt their growth and development.

In my May 22 2017 article titled “Exam Malpractice and JAMB’s Futile Attempt to Tarnish Igbo Image,” I had observed with consternation how this same Prof. Oloyede was quick to have accused UTME candidates of Anambra State of mass cheating with a no-fear-of-God claim that JAMB had caught a whopping 10,000 candidates cheating in Anambra State alone and handed same to the authorities only for the same JAMB to turn around the next day to issue statements to counter Oloyede’s claims.

Consider the following excerpts from that article of May 22 2017: “Like an already well rehearsed script, no sooner had the exams ended than JAMB came up with a wild and ludicrous claim that more than 10,000 candidates were caught in exam malpractices in Anambra State, one of the nation’s leading lights and foremost fulcrum of the nation’s academic excellence.

“How could JAMB have so flagrantly claimed it caught about 10,000 students in Anambra alone cheating at the examinations and handed them over to the authorities?

“Unfortunately, while the Anambra announcement was released so much in a hurry in a bid to crucify Igbo sons and daughters and consequently deny them admission to universities, a more considered statement was released by the same JAMB 24 hours after where it said it would watch CCTV cameras to know centres where cheating took place and those involved.

“If JAMB would need to watch the cameras to ascertain those involved in malpractices before taking appropriate action, why did it not wait to do that before declaring Anambra State candidates guilty en masse? Or is it only CCTV from Anambra centres that would be watched and reviewed? We are watching the watchers and we are reviewing the reviewers. Time shall tell!

…”The said statement also remarked that the candidates ‘adhered strictly to the requirements of the examination.’ If the candidates did adhere strictly to the requirements of the examination, then, where did the 10,000 “cheats” come from? Something is obviously fishy here!”

The question then arises, where did Oloyede get his basis for accusing the Anambra candidates of mass cheating, and what happened to that issue till date? Nothing! It is a lack of accountability and responsibility as this that makes Oloyede and others persist in working so aggressively against Igbo interests. Those who are sympathetic to him because of his recent forced tears of penitence had better smelled the coffee!

The above excerpts prove that Oloyede’s ‘human error’ or ‘technical glitch’ is only an afterthought laced with tears to curry undeserved sympathy and stave attention away from the critical issues. Lagos is only a collateral damage in these theatrics of the absurd. Lagos was unfortunate to have been caught in the web of what is a well-choreographed agenda against Ndigbo. Even at that, a good number of the candidates in Lagos would still end up being Igbo.

If Oloyede was sincere, he would not have waited for threats of protests and class action against him and JAMB before succumbing to a review of the 2025 UTME process. Seeing that there was an unusual “mass failure” in a region that used to produce the best and, sometimes, the highest number of successes in its exams, Oloyede and his team, if they were as competent as one would expect leaders of such an institution to be, should have known that something was definitely wrong somewhere, and a self-examination and review of the entire process would have been ordered without being goaded by external forces.

Rather than show humility and empathy, Oloyede and his JAMB were busy grandstanding and attributing the mass failures, especially as it affected the southeast, to “the trend in recent years.”  One only just hopes that this ugly trend perpetrated against candidates from the southeast region does not continue. An institution like JAMB created to serve national interest must not be allowed to be reduced to an instrument to perpetrate and perpetuate ethnic and religious agendas against an already disadvantaged but resilient people of southeast Nigeria! 

 Jude Ndukwe, Abuja, stjudendukwe@gmail.com