The ongoing concerns over students’ poor performances in this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, and the crisis of confidence within the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, have raised geopolitical tensions.

The result released recently by JAMB showed that over 75 per cent of the candidates who sat for the examination scored below 200 out of the total 400 marks. Admittedly, UTME candidates’ scores have been in steady decline since 2020. Prof Tunji Alausa, the Minister of Education, attributed this ugly trend to the introduction of the Computer-Based Test, CBT, model by JAMB.

But the main cause for concern went beyond the pattern of apparent mass failures. A total of 379,997 candidates, mainly from centres in the South-East, and also Lagos State, were victimised by alleged technical and human error-driven glitches in the recently-released results. Oloyede called a press conference, wept profusely, apologised for the system failure, admitted full responsibility for it, and promptly rescheduled a new UTME for the affected candidates between Friday 16th  and Monday, 19th  May 2025. Several issues are involved here.

Some have faulted JAMB for hastily scheduling a new UTME test without giving the already traumatised candidates adequate time to reprogramme themselves for the re-sit. They fault JAMB’s intention to communicate to them with bulk Short Message Service, SMS, given the well-known 50-60 per cent delivery rate of the service. This would still sideline almost half of the candidates and possibly damage the futures of many of them irretrievably.

JAMB should have either given more time for the re-sit or retrieved the digital answer scripts for proper grading, unless the Board lacks the technology to do so. In August 2020, Sally Collier, head of England’s exams regulator, Ofqual, resigned when technical glitches caused a similar chaos. But in this JAMB case, human errors have been implicated.

It might be pure incompetence. Or, it could also be deliberate sabotage  for reasons best known to the perceived instigators, or Oloyede might have been the target. For nine straight years, Oloyede has returned billions of naira to the Federation Account as surpluses from JAMB’s operations, though JAMB is not a revenue agency but a spender. This has brought Oloyede accolades and awards, and burnished the image of JAMB.

We recommend that snap investigation be conducted to ascertain the real intentions of those behind the errors and remove bad eggs from the system. There must be consequences. If we continue as if nothing happened, the images of JAMB and Oloyede himself may never be the same again.