He has publicly taken responsibility in a society where people in positions fling subordinates under the bus rather than take responsibility….
By FRANCIS EWHERIDO
Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), is a man I have enormous respect for. I have not met him personally, but I admire him from afar. That is one of the hallmarks of impactful people. You don’t have to know or have physical encounter with them to feel their positive impact on the society. I have written two article on him before and do not wish to repeat myself here. My focus today is on the 2025 JAMB Exam, the mass failure and the uproar that followed. One of my wards who took the exam in Lagos told me that most of his classmates scored below 200 and the score he got though above 200 was below his expectation because “I prepared very well and the answers were easy.”
The uproar has been persistent and like many controversies in modern day Nigeria, ethnic colouration has been read into it. Prof Oloyede is a Yoruba man and devout Muslim, but in all the actions he has taken in public office, I have not seen ethnic or religious colouration. May be a saboteur caused the the glitch that led to the mass failure because Oloyede will not go out of his way to make students from a certain ethnic group or religion fail massively. He has no reason to do that. He is very knowledgeable and knows the futility. An upright man that I have come to know from afar, he broke down in tears and publicly admitted the errors last Wednesday during a press conference.
Some people with religious and ethnic bias and cynics leanings are not impressed. They see his action as shedding of crocodile tears and trying to get public sympathy and have asked for his resignation. Prof Oloyede is not an actor, so he is not acting. He is a professor of Islamic studies. He also does not play to the gallery. He doesn’t need to. He is not one of those sit-tight leaders who want to cling unto power by all means. He’s a simple man and when you live a simple life, your needs are few and very easy to meet. It diminishes the urge to cling to power.
Oloyede is genuine. Mistakes have been made and he has publicly taken responsibility in a society where people in positions fling subordinates under the bus rather than take responsibility, where people in positions prefer to spend millions of naira to paint a wrong to be right, where people in authority are cocky and would rather insult those with opposing views than simply apologise.
The issue is, what is the way forward? He assured that the affected 379,997 candidates would be communicated through Short Message Service (SMS) by last Thursday, so that they could reprint their slips the rescheduled examinations on Friday and Saturday. My ward confirmed to me that some of his his classmates have received the SMS to write their exam today (Saturday). This is the Nigeria I crave for. Admit errors and quickly proffer solutions. As humans, there must be mistakes. It happens in every society. How do you react? That is where we have fallen short. Our reaction is what has arrested or truncated our progress as a nation.