JAMB’S computer-based torture

Reading the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) registrar interview in a newspaper on Saturday left me dispirited as it was full of “we are going to” as response to many of the questions by the interviewer.

Even if we pardon the aspect where the professor of Islamic Jurisprudence said, “we have resolved that by next year we are going to be more draconian”, forcing me to reach for my dictionary and check the meaning of the word ‘draconian’ again, it was real that JAMB under Is-haq Oloyede was not fully prepared to conduct the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Across the land, it was a tale of woes upon woes and one could not have but be touched by the horror parents and candidates went through in registering and sitting for the examination. Simply put, JAMB became another word for inefficiency and wickedness. One had thought that commentators had sufficiently tackled the organisation’s lack of adequate preparation in the conduct of an examination that for all intent and purpose seems no longer relevant.

Oloyede’s interview fell short in that he never admitted that the body he superintends actually has any blame in the horror show we just witnessed. A friend’s son who registered in Lagos and opted for Lagos as his examination centre was posted to Igbo Ora in Oyo State just as another friend’s daughter was posted to Ila, Osun State from Lagos.

On Agidingbi Way, Ikeja last week Monday, a crowd of young people milled around the WAEC office waiting for the examination to commence, as they could not access the premises, an example of what JAMB turned the young ones too. Till early afternoon, they were still there waiting for the centre officials to attend to them. Right from registration, the candidates knew that this year’s examination was not going to be smooth, as many of the centres do not have enough facilities to cope with the deluge of candidates. Granted that some of the problems that dogged the UTME predated Oloyede’s time, he is not doing enough to remove the bottlenecks associated with the computer-based test introduced last year. With less-than-stellar computer proficiency among the candidates, blaming them for paying money to operators of some of these centres is missing the point. A desperate student who does not know how to operate computers is at the mercy of crooks that will extort money and the victim, intent on furthering his education, will not mind parting with money to scale the hurdle. Our Internet penetration as a country too, is a disincentive to computer-based tests, as I don’t know any provider that does not fall short in that area.

Did JAMB actually inspect all of the centres used for the UTME and certify that they have enough facilities for the candidates assigned to each centre? How many candidates are tech savvy across the land that we must now eliminate the old format of tests completely? Seeing many young people with smartphones in cities does not mean that it’s like that in villages in our country. By the way, how many public secondary schools have computers to teach their students its usage and application?

Why did JAMB make the mock examinations optional and not compulsory so that some of these flaws could have been discovered and tackled?  The idea that government officials know it all will do more harm than good to our society and this we are already witnessing in Nigeria. Glibly we call the young people the future of Nigeria but we keep treating them with condescension and derision showing that we really care less about them. Are there still test and measurement experts in JAMB? If they are still there, how much of their inputs went into the last UTME? It’s good to move with global trends, but an admittance of our current situation will do us a lot of good before rolling out policies in line with global trends when we have a little above provincial standard?

Major fallout of this computer-based torture is the likely resultant hatred for Nigeria by these youngsters. Getting formal education has become a privilege rather than right in our country and we continue shutting out young people from higher education. So whom are we going to mobilize for our future development? At every corner in Nigeria whether morning or evening, you see an army of jobless youth roaming around without visible means of livelihood, bungling the admission of these young ones to higher institutions will surely add more to such army.