Prof Oloyede, JAMB Registrar
The UTME failures were unprecedently massive. One man stepped forward to take responsibility. Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the JAMB registrar, was that man. He wasted no time in admitting failure on the part of the team he leads.
So, the news broke. The 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results were poor. So muddled up that even perennial failures of the same examination claimed they were robbed of marks. It’s understandable. When it’s raining, you can’t tell who’s crying. Serial failures and their sponsors latched unto the muddle to lap up celebratory tunes in loud tones.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the custodian of the UTME, has failed them. Again, you cannot begrudge them. After the war, every scar becomes scar of war, a totem of sacrifice at the battlefront; even for the lily-livered drones who went into hiding just to evade conscription into the army.
The UTME failures were unprecedently massive. One man stepped forward to take responsibility. Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the JAMB registrar, was that man. He wasted no time in admitting failure on the part of the team he leads.
Initial data released by JAMB on the exam raised the red flag. Over 1.5million candidates out of 1.9million, whose results were released by the board, scored less than 200 marks. That’s community failure. An unusual trend. And it raised not a few antennae. Reviews were called for. Parents, wards wailed in protest. Oloyede heard their fumes and stepped forth. No excuse. No delusional denial. No institutional caterwauling by JAMB to defend an obvious error, human or technical. Many other Nigerian institutions would have risen in brash defence of themselves and their staffers. Some would even dare the wailers to go to court. Yes, the court is an arbiter, a soothing last mile for the aggrieved, the beaten and the broken. But why push people to go to court when you’re wrong. When all you needed to do was to toe the noble path of redress. But restitution is a stranger to the emptily arrogant. Not so this Oloyede and his JAMB. Remorse and penitence wheeled them to the corridor of empathy. A measured show of emotional intelligence. Then that burst of emotion. And some tears. The JAMB registrar did not hold back. Not a bold face he put up to counter the fluvial attacks and criticisms. A man, any man, even a professor of metal and steel, is after all human.
As I watched Oloyede overwhelmed by emotion when he sobbed from his exalted chair in that room with the full complement of Nigeria media, what came flooding my mind was the account of George Stephanopoulos, the former chief press secretary to President Bill Clinton. In his memoir, All Too Human, Stephanopoulos recounted the high and low moments of his boss while he occupied the Oval Office of the White House. His account of Clinton, broken and almost tearing up, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal tore open the hypocrisy of American multi-layered bureaucracy was emotional. Clinton then and even now still rated as one of the best ever US Presidents denied, admitted and stuttered under the weight of an intern and a Ken Starr, the independent counsel and renowned US judge who took full advantage of his assignment to drain Clinton of every energy, even reputation. Stephanopoulos said he could not reconcile why a swashbuckling, charismatic and exceptionally brilliant Clinton would act in “such a stupid, selfish, and self-destructive manner.”
Lesson: Whatever our pedigree, achievements, social status and scholarship, we’re all human. Prone to errors, not immune to failure. We’re all forged in the foundry of frailties. There are times in life when the man collides with the moment. This is so expressive in the lives of a high flyer. It’s not at this moment that we seek the man’s scalp, his innards and even his head. At such moment, the best therapy is to show empathy.
Oloyede came to such moment recently. But rather than deflect the blame to the gods of happenstance, he took responsibility for an error linked to the uneven deployment of a critical server patch required to support major innovations introduced in this year’s UTME. Simply put, JAMB upgraded its system. But while the upgrades were correctly applied to servers in the Kaduna cluster, they were not deployed to the Lagos cluster, which services Lagos and the South-East region. A case of negligence. Human error that led to widespread mismatches in answer interpretation and validation.
On account of this human error, 92 centres in the South-East and 65 centres in Lagos, a total of 157 centres, operated using outdated server logic that could not appropriately handle the new answer submission/marking structure. This affected an estimated 379,997 candidates whose results were severely impacted due to system mismatches during answer validation.
A corollary to this was the 2015 general elections conducted by Professor Attahiru Jega and his INEC. In that election, Jega insisted that card reader must be used in the south but the same Jega relaxed the deployment of card reader in the north thus disenfranchising many voters in the south. Till this day, Jega never apologised or even owned up to this sleight of hand that robbed many Nigerians of the opportunity to vote.
Now, some Nigerians are calling for Oloyede’s head. Away with Oloyode, they rail. Really? The same Oloyede that brought sanity and order to the disorder and corruption that defined operations in JAMB? The same man that breathed accountability and probity into the board? A board where a ‘spiritual’ snake allegedly swallowed about N35 million of public money and slithered away into the darkling drainage system in Makurdi office? Professor Oloyede remains one of the few metaphors for integrity in the nation’s public service agora. He restored dignity to the board and confidence in the UTME. Those calling for his sack or resignation must be enemies of progress, enemies of the nation working to reset the board to the old order of zero accountability and anything goes.
But these anti-Oloyede army should be told the truth. Rather than dissipate energy calling for the resignation of a man that has brought respect to the nation, use the same energy to occupy the offices of your governors and local government chiefs who have stolen your wealth and flaunt it in your face. Occupy the offices of these real rogues until they resign. Leave Oloyede alone.
But Oloyede must ensure that those who fouled up the air with their costly negligence, whether direct or ancillary staffers, atone adequately for their levity. That’s justice.
