Can Segun Aina Tick All the Boxes in JAMB?

Every year, roughly two million young Nigerians sit for JAMB examination that determines whether they enter a university or spend another year waiting. The man now responsible for the integrity of that process is Professor Segun Aina, 40 years old, and the youngest Registrar in the institution’s history.

Age alone would not have made his appointment notable. Aina is also one of Nigeria’s youngest professors, having earned that rank in Computer Engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University, with specialist knowledge in cybersecurity, digital signal processing and computer systems engineering. His profile fits an institution that has become increasingly technology-dependent.

The challenge he faces, though, is of a particular kind. Succeeding a failing institution offers a reformer room to move. Aina succeeds Professor Is-haq Oloyede, whose decade at JAMB converted what was once a scandal-ridden agency into one of the federal government’s most cited examples of institutional accountability, returning billions in remittances to the treasury and eliminating much of the chaos that had defined examination cycles.

That inheritance raises the bar in ways that are difficult to overstate. Aina cannot simply maintain standards and call it progress. The public, the government and the two million annual candidates expect visible advancement.

He announced his intentions on the first day. His five-year agenda, titled JAMB 2031: Building Trust, Reducing Trauma, is built around a framework he calls Project 2:5:7. Flagship goals include a unified JAMB Mobile App, ISO 27001 information security certification, a fully paperless administrative system and a centralised customer service platform designed to reduce the anxiety that candidates and their families carry through every admission cycle.

The cybersecurity dimension of his mandate may prove the most consequential. Examination syndicates have grown more technically sophisticated. Every CBT centre is a potential vulnerability. Aina’s background positions him to address this at a level his predecessors could not, provided the institutional will and the necessary resources follow.

His declared zero-tolerance stance on malpractice and compromised centres sounds familiar from previous administrations. The difference will be whether his technical command of the systems involved gives the policy teeth that rhetoric alone has never managed to provide.

The expectations are steep, the legacy formidable and the margin for visible failure narrow. What Aina does with all three of those facts will define whether his youth was an asset or simply a data point.