I spent all of penultimate Saturday shuttling between two UTME examination centres in the FESTAC and Ojo parts of Lagos, as a pseudo official of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
I also had a brief stop-over at another centre in Ikeja.
And as I sat in a restaurant, at the close of the day, replaying the events of the day in my head, I began to better understand the reason we are where we are (apologies to VP Yemi Osinbajo), as a nation. I also became more convinced that what we need, to thrust us onto enviable heights in the comity of nations is just ordinary public servants determined to dispassionately implement the laws, which already exist in our statutes. We don’t need a king Solomon, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Nehru, Lee Kwan Yu or even JFK. We just need honest everyday people like Prof. Is’haq Oloyede, running our police, army, INEC, NNPC, NPA, Customs, CBN and other MDAs. People who would see black and not only call it black, but also resist every pressure to call it white.
Once we are able to achieve that irreducible minimum, then, even this contraption called Nigeria, which appears a big fraud from its very foundation, could still be made a workable experiment.
In fact, every time I begin to get doubts about the workability of this experiment, I take solace in what is happening at JAMB, where a certain Prof. Is’haq Oloyede superintendents, and reassure myself that things can indeed work.
Nigeria is workable if we would just resolve to implement our laws. When the policemen and traffic officers would not turn a blind eye to the traffic bedlam caused by law breaking commercial bus drivers, okada riders and tricycles on the highway, only to hound and extort private car owners, who are looking for ways to escape the madness, and the attendant traffic robberies.
Nigeria would work when our rulers begin to understand and respect the sanctity of that ‘strange’ concept called separation of powers. When police parties suddenly realise that ‘internal democracy’ is not just a nice-sounding sloganeering. When those who seek elective office are not morbidly scared of elections. When the laws of the land are not interpreted and applied based on the tribe, religion, region or political persuasion of whoever is at the receiving end.
Back to my JAMB class.
I felt so proud of myself when one of the candidates, who turned up for the exam could not be verified by the Biometric Verification Machine, which is JAMB’s variant of the famed card reader of our elections. We had no provision for Incidence Form, mind you!
All of his 10 fingers were tried on the device, at least, thrice each, but the system failed to recognise any of them. After technology seemed to have failed, we even resorted to native intelligence, asking the said candidate to drink water, wipe the fingers, dirty the fingers, and just about every thinkable and unthinkable solution. But the fingerprints still refused to appear and be verified. There were suggestions that we let him in, to write the exam, but we stood our ground. The rule says: no verification, no exam. So, we asked him to leave.
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Of course, there just might have been a chance that this was a failure on the part of the technology, but I was more inclined to believing that there was a compromise at the point of registration, going by my eavesdropping on other candidates’ conversations. Clearly, that candidate wasn’t the one who registered for the exam. His calm, unruffled and unagitated composure said it all. There was something he was not telling us.
It was in anticipation of situations like this that JAMB directs that all 10 fingers of every candidate must be captured at the point of registration so that, at least, one of them would scale the BVM hurdle at every point in time. And as clearly manifested on this exam day, many candidates had to try three to four fingers before the system could recognise and verify them. But that has not completely wiped out the cheats.
In fact, one is appalled at the extent candidates go to enable them compromise the exams. Actually, if they put a quarter of the time and energy they invest, seeking to compromise the system, into reading their books, the eventual pass rate would almost double.
And we would think it’s just the youth of today that are doing this. However, it would appear this cheating menace has always been with us. According to JAMB, a recent, not-too-far-reaching survey revealed that many people in government and key top private sector positions actually got there with questionable results. This is where our over-emphasis on paper qualifications, rather than competence, has landed our dear country!
It has given rise to special centres, miracle centres, and a host of other illegalities, with many candidates, registering severally, to enable them write the same exam several times, and chose whichever one they scored the highest.
Apart from multiple registrations, with one candidate registering about 60 times, there are also registrations by proxies and examination mercenaries.
One particular candidate has consistently sat for the UTME for seven years. And every year, he engages in multiple registrations. Another one registered as a male in one instance, and a female in another. Some register differently with same name and photo, while others register with same photos and different names. But their finger prints and computer sorting often find them out.
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Now, understanding how all these multiple registrations work out in the candidate’s favour is an excursion into new trends in exam malpractices. It is a case of the more you look, the less you see, and the more you see, the less you understand. For instance, you can’t understand why a candidate would finish the exam and sneak out, when properly clocking out is the only honourable way of ensuring that he gets a result. Why would a prospective candidate, at the point of registering for the exam, put only two fingerprints and allow as many as five other people, including the owner of the registration centre, contribute the other fingers to complete the 10 stipulated fingers? Why would a Christian candidate wear hijab to the exam? Why would a candidate, who knows next to nothing in the subjects registered against his name sit in the exam hall, fiddling with the computer for two whole hours and happily clock out at the end of it all, as having sat for the exam? Could someone, somewhere else, be writing the exam for him? Or awarding him humongous scores by hacking into the server? Is this why Prof. Oloyede’s JAMB, year after year, invests millions of narrative, procuring the latest cheating devices on planet earth, and paying ICT experts to decode them? Just to stay a step ahead of the cheats?
Needless to say that, for this same JAMB exam, which many of us are campaigning for a reduction in examination fees, in order not to shut out indigent candidates, some other candidates (including the ordinarily indigent ones) are willing and regularly pay, as much as N200, 000 to cheat.
Of course, another thing that comes to the fore in all these is the falsity of the claim that JAMB and Nigerian universities are only able to admit less than 30% of all those who seek university admission annually, a claim that they use to justify the call for establishment of more universities. The hard truth, however, is that about 30% of the applicant’s are fictitious. Another 20%, or more, do not meet the basic requirements to even sit for JAMB, while a sizeable others apply for the wrong choice or to the wrong university. Yet, several others turn down admissions offered them, after preventing other candidates to take up the slots.
