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“Transparency allows the light of truth to shine through.”
—Chris Richardson
By Omoniyi Salaudeen
After 10 years under Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board is set for a change of baton with the appointment of 39-year-old Professor Segun Aina as Registrar. Aina’s appointment marks a significant generational and technological shift for the exam body, and perhaps for Nigeria’s entire public examination architecture.
Stepping into the role to succeed Oloyede, whose transformative, revenue-yielding tenure officially concludes on July 31, 2026, requires a distinct profile tailored for the next era of Nigeria’s examination ecosystem. The young, erudite Professor of Computer Engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, fits that profile perfectly. While Oloyede’s legacy is rooted in transparency, fiscal discipline, and clearing legacy administrative bottlenecks, Aina’s background points squarely toward deep digital transformation. In choosing Segun Aina, Tinubu wasn’t just replacing Oloyede. He was talent-hunting for JAMB’s next decade.
The Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, framed Aina’s appointment as a deliberate policy shift toward merit-driven, highly technical leadership. By detailing Aina’s intersection of technology, national institutional experience, and policy advisory roles, the Presidency positioned this choice as the outcome of a targeted talent hunt aimed at finding a professional capable of future-proofing Nigeria’s examination ecosystem. His appointment is being widely viewed in policy circles as a deliberate statement by President Bola Tinubu’s administration to prioritise youth excellence and modern competence over traditional age expectations in strategic public offices.
At 39, Aina joins a growing list of young technocrats Tinubu has placed in key agencies: Mustapha Abdullahi, 40, at the Energy Commission of Nigeria; Jennifer Adighije, 42, at Niger Delta Power Holding Company; and Zacch Adedeji at the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
This pattern signals a shift from the old norm of appointing only career bureaucrats or political loyalists. Instead, Tinubu appears to be betting on domain expertise and digital fluency. For an agency like JAMB, which now processes over 2 million UTME candidates yearly through a complex CBT network, that bet makes technical sense.
Aina didn’t just emerge from nowhere. Neither is he an outsider to Nigeria’s examination framework. According to State House records, he began his professional journey at JAMB as a National Youth Service Corps member in the early 2010s. That NYSC posting gave him foundational insight into national admissions logistics, data collation, and the operational weaknesses of paper-based testing.
That early exposure matters. Oloyede himself often says that JAMB’s biggest reforms came from understanding the “pain points” of candidates and CBT centres at ground level. Aina’s NYSC experience means he enters office not as a theoretical academic, but as someone who has seen the system from the inside.
Over the last 15 years, he has built on that foundation as a technical consultant to major educational bodies. His portfolio includes system design and cybersecurity advisory work for the National Examinations Council, NABTEB, and several state ministries of education. At OAU, he rose to become one of Nigeria’s youngest professors of Computer Engineering at 39, with research interests in digital signal processing, network security, and data optimisation. His UK training adds another layer: BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Kent, MSc in Internet Computing and Network Security, and PhD in Digital Signal Processing from Loughborough University. Back home, he topped it with a Senior Management Programme at Lagos Business School. That mix of local institutional knowledge plus global technical training is exactly what JAMB needs as it moves from digitisation to secure digital consolidation.
With millions of candidates sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination annually, the strategic expectations for the incoming Registrar are clear and urgent:
Securing CBT Infrastructure.
JAMB’s migration to Computer-Based Testing since 2015 reduced impersonation and logistics fraud, but it created new vulnerabilities. Data breaches, server overloads during peak registration, and collusion between shady CBT centres and miracle centres remain threats. Aina’s mandate is to enhance cybersecurity protocols around CBT centres to mitigate data breaches and sophisticated examination malpractice. His background in network security suggests JAMB may see end-to-end encryption, real-time server monitoring, and stricter accreditation of CBT centres under his watch.
Optimising identity verification is equally germane. Candidate substitution and multiple registrations still plague the system despite fingerprint capture. During the 2024 UTME, JAMB delisted over 100 CBT centres for malpractice. Aina is expected to optimise identity verification systems using biometrics plus AI to eliminate candidate substitution and speed up verification queues. With his PhD in digital signal processing, he understands how to make biometric matching faster and more accurate under Nigeria’s infrastructural constraints.
Oloyede’s biggest public win was financial: JAMB went from remitting N3m annually pre-2016 to remitting over N50bn to the Federation Account in seven years. That fiscal discipline became part of JAMB’s brand. Aina’s challenge is to ensure the operational transparency and massive internal revenue generation established under Oloyede are maintained, if not surpassed. Digital efficiency usually reduces cost and leakages, so his engineering mindset could push remittances higher through automation and reduced manual intervention.
Aina’s appointment represents a transition from an era of aggressive administrative clean-up to an era of advanced digital consolidation. Oloyede’s tenure was defined by “war” — war against fraud, war against extortion, war against leakages. He introduced the Central Admissions Processing System, stopped post-UTME abuse, and enforced a single cut-off mark discussion annually.
Aina’s era will be defined by engineering: engineering more resilient servers, engineering smarter fraud detection, engineering seamless user experience for candidates in rural areas. His profile as Computer Engineering professor with a PhD in Digital Signal Processing + MSc in Network Security is rare in Nigeria’s academic-political pool. So Tinubu’s team picked someone who already knew JAMB’s backend, not an outsider. At 39, Aina fits Tinubu’s pattern of appointing younger technocrats. The logic is simple: the next decade of JAMB will be fought in code, not just in policy memos.
Education analysts have received the appointment cautiously but positively. Dr. Tunde Akanni, a media and development communication expert, noted: “If Oloyede gave JAMB integrity, Aina must give it invulnerability. The next frontier is cybersecurity. That’s where his expertise is most relevant.”
Some candidates’ advocacy groups have also welcomed the generational shift. The National Association of Nigerian Students said: “We hope a younger Registrar will understand the frustrations of UTME candidates better: server crashes, centre allocation issues, and result delays.”
However, there are concerns too. Critics question whether a 39-year-old academic can manage JAMB’s huge bureaucracy and political pressures from federal lawmakers, state governors, and private CBT centre owners. Managing people will be as critical as managing servers. Oloyede succeeded partly because he combined tech reforms with tough administrative discipline.
Oloyede set the bar high with fingerprint checks, CBT expansion, and crackdown on exam fraud. Under him, JAMB became the gold standard for public sector reform in Nigeria. He proved that a government agency could be transparent, profitable, and efficient at the same time.
So rigorous talent hunting basically meant finding someone who can defend and upgrade that digital infrastructure, not dismantle it. The danger for any successor is either stagnation or reversal. Aina must avoid both.
In this regard, Aina’s first mandate is specific and technical: optimising digital processing engines to handle peak UTME traffic without crashes, expanding CBT architecture to underserved local governments, and tightening exam encryption to stay ahead of fraudsters who now use AI and remote access tools.
The 2027 UTME cycle will be his first major test. By then, he must have audited all CBT centres, upgraded JAMB’s data centres, and built a fraud detection system that matches the sophistication of exam malpractice networks.
JAMB’s credibility is national security. When students lose faith in UTME, university admissions become chaotic and public trust in education collapses. Oloyede restored that trust through transparency. Aina must now secure it through technology.
In choosing Segun Aina, Tinubu made a statement beyond JAMB. He signalled that Nigeria’s critical public institutions need engineers, not just administrators, to survive the next decade. If Aina succeeds, his appointment will be remembered as the moment JAMB moved from digital adoption to digital dominance.
If he fails, the lesson will be that technical expertise without political savvy is not enough. For now, the odds favour him — he knows the system, he has the skills, and he has the mandate. The next 10 years of Nigeria’s largest exam body are in his hands.
