Editor's note: Anthony Kolawole, an educationist at
the Institute for International Strategic Studies in
Abuja, Nigeria's capital city has commended the Joint
and Matriculation Board for its effort in moving
agaisnt the tide during the last examination.
Kolawole also called every Nigerian to suppotr the
initiatives of the examination body under the
leadership of its registrar Ishaq Oloyede.
Nigerians should shout aloud, with thumps up in the
air for Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the current Registrar
of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board
(JAMB). I say everybody should shout loud praises to
him.
Wait a minute! Why am I sounding like an incensed
Pentecostal Pastor, whose tithe basket caught the
biggest “fish” ever, minutes before the
commencement of the evening session of “signs and
wonders?”
It is not exactly so; but it’s something close to it.
Hurray! the JAMB registrar has shamed critics again;
he has silenced skeptics. He has left the professional
exam fraudsters and their allies jobless and lurking
everywhere on the corridors of the educational sector
in Nigeria speechless. Oloyede conducted a
seamless and near 100 percent successful Computer
Based Test (CBT) for the 2017 Unified Tertiary
Matriculation Examinations (UTME) in spite of
malicious opposition to it.
It is in the character of those who reap from the
decay in the education sector to always vehemently
oppose any innovation or the application of reforms
that would sanitize the system. Therefore, they
attacked the JAMB registrar and threw all sorts of
defamatory missiles at him. They called him names
and sued for his crucifixion.
Shockingly, a faction of ASUU, particularly the Ibadan
Zone was part of this conspiracy. They wrote memos,
petitions and probably, resorted to voodoo to attack
Professor Oloyede. When the antics failed to create
the damage and halt the sensitization of JAMB
exams, they laughably called for the sack of the JAMB
registrar, a tested performer, whom they maliciously
brand as incompetent.
Even without JAMB’s independent Information
Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure to
anchor this laudable innovation of CBT, Professor
Oloyede, a university teacher and administrator per
excellence, worked out a perfect synergy with private
ICT centers proprietors and superintended over a
near hitch –free CBT exams.
And come to think of it, over 1,736,571 candidates
sat for the exams, which were segmented in batches
across the nation in a span of one week in 642
centers.
The JAMB boss developed a water-tight and sensitive
ICT security alert system that detected exam
fraudsters who connived with JAMB approved
operators of CBT centers. They were watched in the
central control room, caught and penalized together with fraudulent candidates accordingly.