JAMB just released the latest bombshell in the ever intriguing war zone that Nigeria is becoming. And as usual, everybody wants to blame Nigeria’s young lads for bumbling the UTME exams and I believe that to be unfair.
I mean, why blame young lads for failing in exams when they are passing in social media insults, honourable comradeship, naija songs and dance and other small small things like drug abuse? I believe it will be a tad hypocritical to blame kids for failing when we have contributed in helping them fail. How dare we attempt to enjoy the wonders of Social media and other new media perks yet expect young men to study like we did in the past? Interestingly, it’s not only JAMB! The end of session result recently released by the University where I work is quite instructive and telling. The rate of failure is so massive that the University’s senate was forced to immediately adopt a new grading system.
The truth is, like many Nigerian leaders who love the perks that come with leadership but abhor the responsibility, children of nowadays also love the thrill of sitting for JAMB and the prestige of being addressed as University students, much more than the responsibility that comes with studying to write and pass exams fairly to remain in the University and make something good of themselves. My friend, a lecturer lamented how he went from trying to enforce the ban on the use of smartphones for social media in class to giving up. Half of his class failed!
Since Prof. Oloyede took over as JAMB Registrar, he has embarked on a crusade to cleanse the University Matriculation Examination system. As someone who is on the inside, I know of how parents aide their children by paying test experts to seat for the exams for their wards. In the last JAMB policy meeting, a fellow code named World Best was found to have superimposed his fingerprints on the Registration of over 200 UTME applicants. This person runs a dubious JAMB CBT Center simply referred to as Miracle Centres where candidates are aided to achieve very high scores. Such candidates come to University to rely on exam malpractice or appeal to the greed or immorality of some of their teachers to either bribe or seduce themselves to unearned degrees. Well, JAMB just became like my University where there’s a zero tolerance for malpractice and all forms of immorality and as expected, the students stood no chance.
Prof. Oloyede and his team have worked assiduously to ensure that dubious characters and miracle centres are no longer part of the JAMB story and the result is this round of massive failure. Sad as this is, it represents only the beginning of the meltdown. This failure will reverberate deeper into the very foundations of our education system and it could be the beginning from the end.
We can pretend all we want, but this problem has been staring us in the face for a very long time. JAMB maybe perhaps the last gatekeeper if they continue like this, but they will only succeed in pruning the weed. The main roots are in the secondary and primary schools. It will take a miracle to reposition our public schools and put them back on track as it is. Even teachers of public schools now abhor the system that employs them so much as to send their children to overpriced private schools.
Let’s look on the bright side though. I reckon that this kind of failure may just represent the necessary current that’ll jolt parents and children back to reality. There’s a very strong competition for limited places in Universities as it is and this kind of failure can help Universities manage subscriptions. In this sense, the few whose parents had the presence of mind to guide them properly will finally reap the rewards of their faithfulness to scholarship in a system increasingly becoming unfair to nobodies!
One of such wonderful individuals will be my kid brother – Ibrahim Isah Egya whose emotions will most certainly have veered in the direction of the less than 30% who killed the test. His 280 or so aggregate score has become more valuable now than it should ordinarily be. I have always believed that sometimes what you need is not regulations, but actions that force users to abide by regulations. This is what JAMB has done. They have gone past just repeating the drab narrative against exam malpractice, to creating a technological system that forestalls as well as ensures compliance with regulations against cheating through Examinations.
Other Examination bodies should follow suit. Trust me, primary and secondary school leaders are complicit. The fear that the failure of their students could rob off on them administratively has bent them into aiding and abetting exam malpractice. But with JAMB now making sure the stables are cleaned, their criminal efforts have been rendered useless. Time to do right by children and their parents. The responsibility is ours; all of us!
