Oby Ezekwesili, former Minister of Education, says the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the Ministry of Education were anecdotal in their explanation of the unusual Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results.
The results from JAMB’s 2025 UTME were released on May 9.
An analysis indicated that more than 78 percent of candidates scored below 200 points out of the maximum obtainable 400 points.
This sparked protests questioning the overall integrity of the examination process.
On Wednesday, Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB Registrar, admitted that mistakes made by one of JAMB’s service providers led to distorted results for nearly 380,000 candidates in 157 centres across the Lagos and Owerri zones (which include the South-East states).
In a post on X, Ezekwesili berated the authorities for failing to act with humility by “carrying out an unbiased system check once unusual trends emerged.”
“The Ministry of Education and JAMB were embarrassingly anecdotal in their pejorative, non-evidence-based explanation of the significantly unusual results of candidates in the five South-East states, predominantly,” her post reads.
“Technical matters must always be examined with professionalism, and that has sadly disappeared in the toxic atmosphere created by incompetent and dishonest politicians and intellectuals who should know better.”
The former education minister also shared past X posts from 2018 and 2023 criticizing the exam body’s processes.
“If I were President and my Minister of Education concerned herself with the ‘revenue & remittance’ of the exam body—JAMB—rather than fixing the integrity and competence testing of the exam system, process, and infrastructure,” she wrote, “I would immediately reassign her to the airport toll gate.”
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