The Joint Action Coalition of Civil Society Organization for Transparency in Governance has called on Nigerians to ignore those “out of business” calling for scrap of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and supporton-going reforms by the exam body.
Sabo Odeh, Executive Director of the coalition said this on Sunday, while reacting to recent call by Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU) for the scrapping of JAMB.
Recall that Chairman, ASUU - University of Ibadan Chapter – Dr. Deji Omole asked JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede to resign over allegedlopsided nature of the JAMB registration.
Odeh said the reforms introduced by JAMB into admission process in Nigeria appears to have taken many members of ASUU engaged in admission racketeering out of business and they are not happy.
He said, “If ASUU is allowed to dictate how JAMB does it work, it is a matter of time before the lecturers set their sight on WAEC, Secondary and even primary schools.
“The clamour by ASUU that each university should be allowed to handle its own admission processes is an open call to empower these admission syndicates operated by no other persons but ASUU members.
”Heeding ASUU’s ill-conceived call would send us back to the problems that JAMB was set up to solve.
“In the years that preceded JAMB, it was common to see some candidates secure admission into as many as five universities which implies that four slots would we wasted as the student can only resume in one school while several other candidates are made to wait another year at home because these slots have been wasted.”
Odeh blamed ASSU for the decay in the education sector, saying the union had lost its moral compass and did not have the capacity to challenge the reforms being introduced by JAMB under Professor Oleyede.
He accused the union of frustrating interventions that would re-establish Nigerian university as centre of excellence where youths can pass through and favourably compete with their contemporaries from any other top flight institutions on earth.
“ASUU, as it did in the 90s, is giving the impression that it is genuinely interested in the wellbeing of would be undergraduates.
“We took time to study the situation with a view to ascertaining if ASUU’s intervention in the way JAMB conducts its major or mock examination is altruistic as they make it appear.
“Sadly, all that can be surmised from ASUU’s interference in this process is that they have resumed their efforts to hijack the education sector for their own purposes. Note that we say education sector because they have gone beyond their remit as higher institution teachers to dabble into academic levels that are outside their jurisdiction.”
Odeh insisted that the current JAMBinnovations remains the best approach to ensure that only the best gets admitted into the nation’s tertiary institutions.
He said, “The embrace of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), coupled with other policy direction has helped JAMB make changes that increased the admission chances of applicants.
“It has for instance streamlined the options of schools that candidates have based on careful analysis of trends. This innovation is also responsible for the curtailing of the way ASUU members used to manipulate admissions while side-lining JAMB.”
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