The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Prof. Isa’aq Oloyede, in this interview with GRACE EDEMA warns parents to desist from interfering during an examination process
A major scandal of result forgery, committed by a JAMB candidate, Mmesoma Ejikeme, in 2023, was an issue that drew global attention, what are the lessons?
Nothing. There was nothing to be learned from it because, from the beginning, we knew that it was false.
We know that some Nigerians are emotional. We know that people will not face the facts. We know that people will want to crucify a public institution because they do not have confidence in public institutions. We know that we need to prove that we are right.
I think lessons will have been learned by the candidates, by the parents, by those people jumping to the issue without verification, by those who didn’t trust JAMB, who believed that all government institutions were corrupt and guilty before being heard. They are the ones who learned the lesson. We learned nothing from it because we did nothing wrong. And everything went according to what we said.
Those who misbehaved should have learned some lessons from what happened.
We were not in any way disturbed. You know, some of our colleagues from outside the country, were asking us, what happened?
How would your government do this without you being heard? Consequently, in the Senate, you see that appropriate lessons have been learned because somebody brought similar issues to the Senate.
And the president of the Senate graciously said go and investigate before you drag JAMB again into this matter.
And we had to thank the Senate President for that leadership. It turned out that even the second person had no grounds.
People believed the child. Like anything in Nigeria, the underdog is taken to be the right person while the person they consider superior will have to explain even when there was no reason for that. Well, in Nigeria, motorcycles don’t hit cars. It’s a car that hits motorcycles.
That’s our understanding of justice. The perverted justice at that.
Looking at the Nigerian education system, how would you describe its learners?
I do not see anything different. Nigerian students are not different. Those that are different are the parents. We have peculiar parents.
They are parents who will intrude unnecessarily, who want to manipulate the system, who want everything to be about them, and who are just thinking about their children and not thinking about others.
You will see a parent, for instance, in Nigeria, who will be shouting, my child scored 305. He wanted to study Medicine at the University of Ibadan and he was not admitted.
And he has Seven A1. That’s his self-opinion. He’s just having an unnecessarily high opinion about himself and his child.
If your child scored 305 in a class, out of 400, he will be marked as obtainable. You are forgetting that some scored 380, 370, and 360 and your child will be ranked. And your child will be the best in your village but he will come out to be number 340 in Nigeria. So why are you looking at yourself and not looking at the content, the situation in which your child finds himself?
We are taking a decision now that we will make a candidate culpable once the mother or father or the parent of that person is found to have disrupted our examination.
They are intruders. Some people just want to manipulate the system. There was a case of a centre having a problem in the first session of the exam.
The problem was a cable problem and was resolved within 30 minutes, but they couldn’t continue with the exam, the session had already ended due to the delay they had.
So, the first session missed will have to be rearranged to become another first session.
That was how parents insisted that the second and third sessions would not commence because their children couldn’t sit the first session. The center had to bring in security agents to arrest the situation. What type of parents are these? We are now saying that any centre that allows a parent to get near where the candidates are being screened or being treated, that centre will be delisted. Secondly, we have instructed the centres to just identify the parent and the candidate, we would take a proper sanction, against the candidate. Whoever has a bad parent deserves to suffer the consequences of the bad behavior of the parent. They cannot be destroying the careers of other students because of their own emotions and indiscipline.
On the kidnap issue, 280 students were kidnapped in Kaduna, what’s the implications of this to the education sector and what advice do you have for the government?
Let’s focus our attention on how we will make sure we bring the ladies back, that is the issue now, we shouldn’t start our instructions, something has happened let’s see how we first of all solve the problem, before we now talk about, what is the implications.
