Expdonaloaded News; JAMB/2015 CANDIDATES FACE-OFF: Locating the truth and doing something with it

The protest, penultimate week, by parents and candidates of the 2015 JAMB (Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board) and some organisations like the Association of Tutorial School Operators of Nigeria, led by its President, Sodunke Oludotun, over the JAMB’s new admission policy, following its 2015 combined policy meeting, to post or re-assign candidates applying to universities with surplus applicants for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME), to other universities with lower number of applicants than their capacities, must have come to the examination body as a big surprise. Hence, the flurry of denials that followed.

First, authorities of the University of Lagos where the protest started, in the first place, after the institution’s announcement that only candidates whose names were officially forwarded by JAMB, were eligible to participate in the institution’s this year’s post-UTME, denied that they were ever in the know about JAMB’s plan to post candidates whose examination performance did not meet the cut-off marks of their first choice institutions to other universities, including the ones they did not apply to.  In other words, the decision was solely JAMB’s.
But the interview that Dr. Benjamin Fabian, JAMB’s Head of Public Relations had with Sunday Punch of July 26, 2015, and Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, the JAMB’s Executive Secretary later had with Channels Television showed that it was a collective decision between JAMB and the universities.
In an answer to another question put to him, Fabian made a statement that put a lie to UNILAG’s denial of being a party to JAMB’s decision: “When UNILAG made it abundantly clear to us that this is the number and the kind of students it was going to admit, for those that did not score up to that, what we are going to do is to look for other levels of education for them. We will make sure that they are placed in other schools that can give them admission based on what they scored. That is what we are doing.”
It is good that the Federal Ministry of Education, led by its Permanent Secretary, Dr. MacJohn Nwaobiala, has rescinded the decision, or better still, put it in abeyance, to post candidates to any institution of JAMB’s choice, following the nationwide outcry that greeted the new admission policy.
But the truth is that though well intentioned, the policy was more or less, smuggled in through the backdoor, perhaps, for fear that the public may strongly oppose it if they get to know. If, as stated by Nwaobiala, the Federal Government has truly commenced consultations, with the aim of identifying where adjustments could be made, then the place to start is to take critical stakeholders into confidence, to consult widely before any decision could be taken and to state it clearly in the brochure, that will be issued later, that this is what any candidate who is signing up for JAMB should expect at the end of the day.
The second body of truth is the need to have, in place, as soon as possible, a substantive Minister of Education who will come up with an all-comprehensive education policy that will not only increase the carrying capacities of all our universities and put them at par with first-generation and second-generation universities like Universities of Ibadan, Lagos, Nsukka, ABU, Ife, Benin, Jos, but are also technologically equipped to handle the challenges of 21^st century university education by de-emphasizing paper certificates and embracing skill-driven knowledge acquisition.