If the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) was sick when Professor Ishaq Oloyede was appointed registrar 10 years ago, it might have been said that even great institutions have their difficult times. That’s not unusual. But JAMB wasn’t sick.
It was dying and becoming so irrelevant that those it was supposed to serve were wishing it dead. JAMB was not just a problem; it had become the problem of gaining admission to higher institutions, with heartbreaking stories of thousands of candidates for whom hard work and good WAEC grades no longer seemed to matter.
Beating the system became the sport, and fraudulent coaches, often assisted by JAMB insiders, established “miracle centres” with large signboards offering hallelujah promises of how to pass your exam without sitting for it. We can smile now, but believe me, it was not a laughing matter.
Centralised national school placement was not always the thing. Before JAMB was created in 1978, universities and other higher institutions conducted their own admissions. But once JAMB was established and admissions were centralised, schools’ discretion was curtailed.
As the demand for higher education outstripped supply and public and private higher schools proliferated, standards collapsed. The regulator, which was supposed to serve candidates, began to serve itself instead, feeding off the misery of desperate candidates.
