“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” —Henry Ford
By Cosmas Omegoh
Men hardly weep – at least not in the open. They hardly sob or shed tears either. Men are steely. That is the way they are wired. But if a man must weep, he does so in his closet or right inside his heart. When men grieve, they allow their hearts to soak their grief; their tears flow deep and wide in the chambers of their hearts. So they hardly betray their grief.
In some cultures, it is a taboo for men to wail. Their tears don’t drop to the ground either. Should that happen, a man might be interpreted as weak. It’s a clear sign of defeat. He is outclassed – overwhelmed!
But last Wednesday, the registrar of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede wept. He didn’t do so at a corner; he did it in the public. He not only wept, he allowed his tears to drop to the ground. He was overwhelmed.
Clad in his trademark cap and a blue caftan, Oloyede’s voice quivered as he gave a press briefing in Abuja to address JAMB’s role in the mass failure in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). Oloyode was unstable as he spoke. At every turn, he fought back tears to steady his voice from breaking. He struggled with deep emotions, intermittently dousing his tears with a handkerchief. Looking shipwrecked, he was such a spectacle to watch as the floor he rested his feet seemed to quake from beneath. It did indeed – because the matter he was dealing with was a national disaster. About 75 per cent of candidates that wrote the 2025 JAMB Computer Based Test he conducted scored 200/400. In some climes, nothing can be as troubling!
When the news of the JAMB disaster broke, it broke many hearts. Then a little later, it began to assume a life of its own, despite spirited attempts to blame the debacle on the youths. Parents, candidates and other key stakeholders had come out lamenting what happened, insisting that it was unusual. But the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, thought differently. He would have none of anybody’s cries that something untoward had happened. He hit the town celebrating the disaster as another President Bola Ahmed Tinubu gain. He claimed that the government had mounted a full proof strategy that ensured that examination cheats were beaten to their own game. He claimed that the mass failure was a clear showing that the students were not reading and not ready to do so. He celebrated “laundering” his ministry’s dirty linen in public, daring the consequences. To him, it had to get worse to get better. But he forgot that the issue was becoming a national emergency that would splash on everyone’s face without a warning.
Many parents and candidates who told their ordeal first hand following the conduct of the UTME were adamant that they had a better narrative. In some instances, candidates claimed that they had to travel several kilometers before getting to their examination centres at 6:30a.m. Some said they could only manage to write two papers before their system either shut down or timed out. Some didn’t even have the system to write at all. Some claimed they were wrongly credited with poor results, insisting that they were sure they couldn’t have had such a dismal outing. The heap of complaints that poured in was sky high. That never happened before.
Then from many homes and hamlets, there were echoes of despair, disappointment and grief. Many students could not understand how JAMB arrived at crediting them with dismal grades; some began to contemplate death. But sadly, the authorities remained unfazed, the education ministry adamant. Then it emerged that a certain 19-year-old Faith Opesusi Timileyin had taken her own life by drinking rat poison after she was credited with a poor result. Then some stakeholders began threatening lawsuits, forcing what began as a shouting match to become a scandal of monumental proportion. Everything about it appeared every step compelling. That was when Prof Oloyede and the rest of the big men at the agency were jolted to a backward glance.
However, till tomorrow, Prof Oloyede is praised to the skies as a man of a separate hue – a University of Ilorin distinguished academic with a specialty in Islamic Studies. He is said to be straight as an arrow. People speak well of his integrity. They say since he was headhunted in 2016, by former President Muhammadu Buhari to take over the reins of JAMB, the agency had become the country’s cash cow; he keeps remitting the tons of excess cash in billions of naira to the government after every examination year. Before his arrival that had never happened before; no one knew that JAMB ever made such humongous money. He is also said to be a man who works with the strength of steel. His fans applaud his arrival at JAMB, saying he had been unrelentingly driving transformative reforms that had seen the curve of the examination body pointing to the clouds.
But last week, all that Oloyede had laboured for at JAMB seemed to have come to a screeching halt. Oloyede simply didn’t know how and where the rains began to beat him. He didn’t know how to tell what went down. He had no hiding place. Papering the cracks at JAMB was needless. The moment of truth undeniably starred him in the face. He chose the flow of truth.
When Oloyode sat to tell the world what he knew about the pain of the nation, he carried such a huge burden on his head and in his heart. The steel he was made of had undeniably crumpled. Every strand of courage which had seen him withstand long years of academic rigour without blemish had eroded. Only a few ounces of energy were still left in him and it showed. So he broke down; he wept.
“I apologise for the trauma caused to the candidates,” a distraught Oloyede told a bewildered nation, his words heavy with emotions as he blamed glitches for the disaster. His words sounded more like a dirge as tears welled up in his eyes, yet he drew applause from his listeners – those who at that moment of grief still had the balls to clap.
“Today marks a moment we shall not soon forget,” Oloyede continued “– a day that should have been filled with celebration for what was, until recently, regarded as our most successful UTME exercise. Regrettably, this joy has been overshadowed by an easily avoidable error by one or two persons,” he lamented.
Delving into the heart of the matter he said: “In simple terms, while 65 centres (206,610candidates) were affected in Lagos zone (comprising only Lagos State), 92 centres (173,387 candidates) were affected in Owerri zone, which includes the Southeast states. “In clear terms, in the process of rectifying the issue, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for LAG (Lagos and South-East zones) inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers. Regrettably, this oversight went undetected prior to the release of the results.”
In a shocking retreat which some people insist was necessary, JAMB had forced a rewriting of the examination yesterday by some of the affected candidates. That leaves opinions divided. While some people are calling on the professor to resign, some are commending him for his honesty in bringing the rot in JAMB to limelight. Overall, the chain of events was seismic, clearly bringing out the shame of the nation. And what is more, it unearthed just a little fraction of the quantum of rot that many of which had long been going on without anyone either knowing or raising a whimper.