The Joint Action Coalition of Civil Society Organization for
Transparency in Governance has called on Nigerians to ignore those “out
of business” calling for scrap of the Joint Admissions and
Matriculation Board (JAMB) and supporton-going reforms by the exam
body.
Sabo Odeh, Executive Director of the coalition said this on
Sunday, while reacting to recent call by Academic Staff Union of
Universities, (ASUU) for the scrapping of JAMB.
Odeh said the reforms introduced by JAMB into admission process in
Nigeria appears to have taken many members of ASUU engaged in admission
racketeering out of business and they are not happy.
He said, “If ASUU is allowed to dictate how JAMB does it work, it is a
matter of time before the lecturers set their sight on WAEC, Secondary
and even primary schools.
“The clamour by ASUU that each university should be allowed to handle
its own admission processes is an open call to empower these admission
syndicates operated by no other persons but ASUU members.
”Heeding ASUU’s ill-conceived call would send us back to the problems that JAMB was set up to solve.
“In the years that preceded JAMB, it was common to see some
candidates secure admission into as many as five universities which
implies that four slots would we wasted as the student can only resume
in one school while several other candidates are made to wait another
year at home because these slots have been wasted.”
Odeh blamed ASSU for the decay in the education sector, saying the
union had lost its moral compass and did not have the capacity to
challenge the reforms being introduced by JAMB under Professor
Oleyede.
He accused the union of frustrating interventions that would
re-establish Nigerian university as centre of excellence where youths
can pass through and favourably compete with their contemporaries from
any other top flight institutions on earth.
“ASUU, as it did in the 90s, is giving the impression that it is
genuinely interested in the wellbeing of would be undergraduates.
“We took time to study the situation with a view to ascertaining if
ASUU’s intervention in the way JAMB conducts its major or mock
examination is altruistic as they make it appear.
“Sadly, all that can be surmised from ASUU’s interference in this
process is that they have resumed their efforts to hijack the education
sector for their own purposes. Note that we say education sector because
they have gone beyond their remit as higher institution teachers to
dabble into academic levels that are outside their jurisdiction.”
Odeh insisted that the current JAMBinnovations remains the best
approach to ensure that only the best gets admitted into the nation’s
tertiary institutions.
He said, “The embrace of Information and Communication Technology
(ICT), coupled with other policy direction has helped JAMB make changes
that increased the admission chances of applicants.
“It has for instance streamlined the options of schools that
candidates have based on careful analysis of trends. This innovation is
also responsible for the curtailing of the way ASUU members used to
manipulate admissions while side-lining JAMB.”
