JAMB AS A DESTRUCTIVE MONSTER IN THE NATION’S TERTIARY ADMISSION PROCESS

Uwakwe Roland

You may not like the title of this article but there is no other way to drive home my point than to use it to capture my state of mine. For the benefit of persons who are not aware, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation's Board has purportedly sent the list of admitted students to different universities for screening. What this means is that these universities will be required not to conduct any test but to check the credentials of the candidates sent to them by JAMB. These universities may not be given the opportunity to pick the candidates of their choice; hence if idiots are sent to them for admission they have no option than to comply.

The ugliest part of this development is that most of these candidates are not chosen based on merit but on stupid appellations delimited with “catchment area” and “educational less developed states”. This is a situation where they consider the immediate states where such schools are located and the supposed states that have few educated persons to maintain a balance in the federation. This is at the detriment of merit and hard work. By this position JAMB rewards mediocrity in place of merit.

This is the 21^st century where it is on record that no Nigeria University is among the 1000 best universities in the world. Even in the microscopic African continent that Nigeria pride itself as the giant of Africa, none of the nation’s tertiary institutions are said to be among the first 100. And this has resulted to a situation where the elite prefer sending their children and wards to better schools abroad. If you check very well, you will agree with me that some of the persons who came out with this policy have their children schooling abroad.

With all sense of humility, University education is not meant for everybody, which is why education at the basic level to me should be a justiciable right where every living being should be taught how to read, write and develop their latent potentials. The wisdom is that after some basic training, if a student still lacks the intellectual ability for a higher intellectual exercise, they should be encouraged to develop careers in some other informal sectors. So the idea of educational less developed state is a mystery to me and a misnomer for any serious minded nation. Sometimes I few strange to belong to this part of our world where people who are meant to know better show a good sense of imbecility,  take the example of the United States that is seen as the leader of the world, check their policies, they do not joke with good heads irrespective of their nations of origin. No matter what you may have against them, the US is a progressive nation, which is why it attracts the best and seen by many as a land of opportunities.

I think the Universities through bodies like, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), body of Vice Chancellors of the nation’s Universities and similar bodies in other tertiary institutions in the country should come out strongly to condemn or even stop JAMB before they further destroy what some few universities are doing to increase the standard of our tertiary education. Nigeria Universities are seeking for autonomy and JAMB is in a clog in the wheel of progress, hence it is time, we abolish JAMB for the betterment of our educational system. The National Universities Commission should be there to regulate and fashion out policies that will increase the standard of education in the country, hence JAMB should be scrapped since it has outlived its usefulness in the contemporary knowledge based economy.