By Suyi Ayodele

“Dear Ajanlekoko Oriojobi Samuel (real name withheld), Reg Number: 2125512372451F. 2025 UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed.”

With the above terse message from the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the fates of thousands of Nigerians who sat for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) were sealed.

Those thousands of candidates will never see their results. Their parents or guardians, who paid the registration fees and took the candidates—children in their teens—to the various examination centres, will never know the performances of their children’s or wards.

Incidentally, those candidates did not commit any examination malpractice. They were not guilty of any crime known or unknown. Their crime was to be children of the Nigerian society that looks backwards, where other climes are forward marching!

The only crime those affected “underaged’ candidates committed was to be endowed with brains that the awkward system we run here frowns at. Their counterparts in other sane countries of the world are celebrated. But here, we are still in the Stone Age to accept that there are geniuses!

So, when Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the JAMB Registrar, came crying over the mass failure recorded for over 400,000 candidates who wrote this year’s UTME because of the glitch which affected JAMB servers, Nigerians must know that there were more issues than the computer malfunctioning Oloyede cried about. The tears of the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin were nothing but Ekún Egbére.

When two rival wives fight and one cries when the matter comes up for adjudication, my Yoruba elders have a way to qualify that. They devise a saying: Arojó sunkún obìrin, ilé níi tú (A woman who cries while stating her case tends to destroy the home) to explain the intention of such an act. The tears by the woman playing the victim are considered manipulative.

Elders who sit in judgment don’t usually pay attention to the crying woman in any dispute. They could see through her deceptive tears and her true intention — simply to gain undue sympathy. In my culture, a woman is allowed to cry as much as she wants and then asked to restate her case. More often than not, the crying woman turns out to be the guilty party.

There is a more graphic and semiotic way to qualify such crocodile tears. The Yoruba concept of “Ekún Egbére” is the apt way to describe manipulative tears by the one trying to play the victim.

Ekún Egbére means the tears of the goblin (or bush baby). Egbére in Yoruba mythology refers to a short spiritual being who goes about with a small mat, crying. The myth around the goblin, Egbére, says it cries out, looking for sympathy for its unusually small stature among the legion of ghomids created by Obatala.

It tells whoever cares to listen that the creator is unfair to it by making it the smallest of the ghomids, whereas it has more potential than any others ever created. Those other ghomids Egbére accuses of conspiracy against it. It says they conspired to dampen its potential and good work! How true?

What Egbére, however, does not tell its listeners and would-be sympathisers is the fact that its small stature has nothing to do with any heavenly factory faults. The fault is due to the goblin’s own making of rubbing the wrong lotion on its own body while it had just come out of Obatala’s furnace without waiting for the god of creativity to apply the normal lotion.

Egbére, the legend states, mistakes the white lotion (efun idagba) for the one that would give it a giant stature. But by design, it is the black lotion from the palm kernel that makes all Obatala’s creatures big and tall. Egbére defies all entreaties to wait, be patient and allow the day to break before setting out for the pot of lotion.

It realised too late that it had touched the wrong pot and applied the wrong lotion. Its growth becomes stunted such that its hands could not reach the shelves where Obatala keeps his treasures. The only thing within the reach of the Lilliput is the small mat that Egbére carries about as its permanent burden. The mat, though believed to be a harbinger of fortune, no one in history has been recorded to have become wealthy as a result of taking possession of it.

So, Egbére goes about crying, giving a false narrative to gain the people’s sympathy as the victim of Obatala’s creative abnormality! It does that without stating how it goes against the general principle of discretion and the heavenly discipline of patience and respect for public opinion.

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As it is with Egbére, the crying spirit, so is it with Professor Oloyede, the Registrar of JAMB, whose conduct of the last UTME leaves the nation gasping for breath at the rate of mass failure recorded in the five states of the South-East geopolitical zone and Lagos, the Centre of Excellence!

Expectedly, heaven has been let loose on Oloyede, especially from our fellow Nigerians from the East. The noise from that region over what many considered to be a deliberate attempt to deny candidates of Igbo extraction admission into our universities, is enough to sink this federation. Most unfortunate is that the intelligentsia from the South-East joined the fray of ethnic profiling of the computer errors that occurred!

As much as I find most of the comments from the South-East over the JAMB glitch case alarming, I think the reaction speaks more to some fundamental issues about our nationhood. It is most unfortunate that 65 years after independence and an avoidable civil war where we lost over two million patriots, Nigeria is still as divided as the period we were struggling for independence. Most saddening is that no administration after the 1967-1970 civil war has brought to the fore our differences more than the current government, which began in 2015 with the administration of General Muhammadu Buhari!

It is, therefore, natural for the South-East to easily conclude that the recent JAMB misfortune was targeted at the region. The bitter argument here, which many of us are not ready to accept, is that the Igbo race has not been treated fairly by the Nigerian nation. The only unfortunate argument by the Igbo is to think that the Yoruba are their sole enemy!

And I say this without any apology, until the Ndigbo consciously realise that they suffer the same fate as other ethnic groups, they will remain largely marginalised. Until they shed the toga of Yoruba-hate-us and adopt the holistic idea that most ethnic groups in Nigeria have one thing or the other against the Ndigbo, nothing will change for them.

Should that be the case too, the Ndigbo must also look inward and ask self-directed questions as to why the race is detested by virtually all other ethnic nationalities. They must do self-retrospection to determine what in the attitude of an average Igbo man would make others dislike him.

While doing that, the Nigerian nation must also take deliberate steps to integrate the Ndigbo into our nationhood. The attitude of ‘no-Igbo-man-can-be-president’ doesn’t augur well for our unity. If the Ndigbo are not good enough to lead Nigeria, can we deliberately allow them to own their own space, their nation, where they will have no one to contend with?

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This is why it is difficult to rationalise that the glitch which affected JAMB servers affected all five states in the South-East and Lagos! For people who already feel unwanted, it will be difficult for anyone to convince them to look at the issue from the angle of science and technology.

I want to put my shirt on it that if the errors had occurred only in the South-West states, no matter the sophistication of the people there, there would have been no outcry of ethnic attack on the prospects of the candidates from that region. That is due to the pseudo-federalism we practice. The North-East, North-West, North-Central and South-South would have felt the same way. The only difference, probably, would have been the magnitude of the outcry.

While JAMB has our sympathy for the unfortunate incident, I think there are some other fundamental issues we need to address here. I strongly believe that whatever happened in JAMB or with JAMB or to JAMB can be traced to just one problem: restructuring deficiency!

A lot of Nigerians have said that it is wrong to have just one body conducting examinations for both federal, state and private universities in a country that claims to run federalism! The recent claims by JAMB that it remitted over N6 billion to the coffers of the Federal Government makes the body more of a profit-making venture than a serious examination set up.

If we celebrate JAMB for making enough profit like a business venture, for the Federal Government, what about the state-funded universities? What part of that ‘profit’ goes to the private universities? Should JAMB be talking about how much money it rakes in or how effective it is in the conduct of the examinations it was established to conduct?

Take the case of the “underaged” candidates we mentioned above. Why would JAMB withhold the results of candidates it termed “underaged” after collecting the registration fee from them? Where is that done, except in a country where roguery is the order of the day?

If the National Assembly had been alive to its responsibilities, would JAMB have had the audacity to withhold candidates’ results based on being “underaged” without any act of parliament allowing that? If a candidate purchased a form, submitted the form, was accredited and allowed to write an exam, why would the examination body send the message: “UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed” without showing the actual scores of the candidates?

Oloyede is a brilliant scholar, no doubt. He did well, so they say, when he was the VC of the University of Ilorin. But I find it difficult to believe that it did not occur to the erudite professor that some parents actually asked their children to write the examination as a mock exercise to prepare those children for when they will be of age, according to the backwards-thinking policy of age limit for admission into our universities?

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So, if Oloyede comes shedding Ekún Egbére on national television because he wanted our sympathy, we should, while giving him handkerchief to clean his crocodile tears, tell him that he is presiding over a rotten institution that bears no relevance to modern-day progressive ideas of a nation that desires development.

Agreed cyber-attack or glitch is not peculiar to Nigeria. Our major concern is how, when it happened to us, it wore a three-piece suit of ethnic colouration and age discrimination! That is the peculiarity of the Nigerian version of the global phenomenon. In Nigeria, what affects other nations comes in different shapes, shades and dimensions for us. Nigeria must always “happen” to any universal issue that finds its way to our shores!

So, Oloyede can ‘cry me a river’. It will not vitiate the fact that the institution he supervises is both deaf, dumb and backwards thinking in a global society that makes progress. JAMB, we all can recall, subjected children to uncommon trauma when it allowed them to be on the road to the examination centres as early as 5.00 am! Whatever happened to the server is just a continuation of that trauma.

We shall all see the outcome when the results of the resit examinations are out. We don’t need any professor of child psychology or education planning, and measurement to tell us that those candidates would not be at their optimal best while resitting the examinations.

If truly we want a restructured country with full-fledged federalism, JAMB has no business conducting examinations, for instance, for Ekiti State University or Afe Babalola University. It has no business determining the questions Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, or Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, should set for its intended undergraduates. What do we even gain from the centralised examination when a candidate with a grade of 250 marks from any of the South-West states will be denied admission to study Medicine, and his counterpart from Zamfara State who scored 180 marks will be given a laboratory coat as a medical student?

Nigeria must begin to address its numerous imbalances. This present administration, run by those whose slogans while in the trenches as opposition leaders, were restructuring and true federalism, should walk the talk and live like men of honour. JAMB is a deep example of a unitary system in federalism! It makes a mockery of all of us.

The lawlessness of JAMB at fixing the age limit for its examination against a subsisting judgment of a competent jurisdiction apes the lawlessness of the government of the day. Nigeria, no doubt, needs an effective and efficient examination body. What the nation does not need now is a weeping Chief Executive of its examination body. Ekún Egbére won’t solve our self-inflicted problem; proper restructuring will do. Maybe we should just start with JAMB.