Why we have taken some painful decisions –JAMB Registrar Oloyede

Blessed with a rare pedigree, integrity and outstanding records when he was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede was about six months ago appointed the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). In this interview with newsmen, he opened up on his new task and the reforms being put in place. YUSUF ALLI, Managing Editor, Northern Operation, reports the encounter.

JAMB is obviously a new terrain from university administration. What challenges did you inherit? Are they surmountable?

There are no insurmountable challenges. Of course, an establishment like this is  a growing concern. Problems would come and we will  solve them but there is no major problem that one can say is beyond our capacity.  It has been building on what my predecessors have done. Somebody ends at a point and another comes on board.

What we have done is to fine-tune what is on ground to make our services better for the public. We have taken some very painful decisions like elimination of scratch cards. We know that some people earn a living from the sale of scratch cards but that is not the type of life we want to encourage, it is extortion.  They buy the card from our office and they sell at exorbitant price to the users. The scratch card has a particular amount, between N1,000 and N2,500 and they end up selling the cards four to five times higher. The scratch card has led to massive corruption in the system. As I speak, a number of our staff are with the police for some corrupt practices that are related to scratch card.

We also believe we could assist the government with a bid to rake in all collectable revenue. Therefore, we have also eliminated the middleman in the process of rendering our services. Our end users now pay directly to the TSA. This makes the management and monitoring of our revenue easier than the cards.

The second one is about the examination itself, we are not aware of anywhere in the world where you do Computer Based Test (CBT)and there would be no electronic monitoring. We believe that it is an omission on our part which we have now rectified.  We are insisting that all our CBT centres must have Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras. The reason is that if a student or candidate is not caught during the exam, the possibility of being caught after the examination is there and the evidence would also be there to show him clearly that he had actually cheated.

We are also improving on the process by making it easier. For instance, there are services that are hitherto cumbersome like candidates coming to JAMB headquarters in Bwari, Abuja saying they want to change their data, regularisation and so on. Most of them stay here for days, if not weeks. In the process, some of them are extorted and some ladies would find themselves sleeping where they were not supposed to. But now, we have automated the system such that nobody needs to come to JAMB office. Even if you do, you would not be able to access the services. You can complete the form online and we  assure that services would be rendered as fast as possible. All you need do is to pay to TSA online.

How about the UTME ?

We are also considering the timing of the examination. UTME examination normally holds around March and the result would be ready in 2-3 days. But when do we need the results? It is July – August. This timeline gives room for suspicion. If you go on the Internet, you will see people claiming that they could help candidates to upgrade their results. The results are lying fallow between March and July. Now, we want to shorten the period in such a way that the time between the examination and when the result would be used would be very short so that there would be no opportunity for anybody to even dream about such.

We are also using that opportunity to communicate with examination bodies such as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), National Examinations Council (NECO), National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) to ensure that we do not make our examinations mutually exclusive. Somebody is taking WAEC and wants to take JAMB,due to clash and time, he may have to sacrifice one for the other. We have harmonised the timing  in such a way that the period we are going to use for our own examination will not clash with other examination bodies. We have also upgraded our facilities to serve the community better.

We are also looking at making the results we give are highly credible. That  is why we are in talks with other agencies and improving on the technology facilities and infrastructure we are using. That is why we are talking with other agencies including NYSC to make sure they also participate in such a way that we open up the process and vouch for the integrity of our examination. Some of the facilities that  hitherto were being outsourced are now being done in-house.

For example, those service providers who collect commission for their jobs, those jobs that we think we can do, we are increasing the capacities in-house and we are doing them. We are thereby saving the money we could have paid to service providers because some of them have even abused the privilege with some of the sharp practices that they also engage in.

How did you come about  1.7m candidates for this year’s UTME examination?

That figure I gave was last year’s figure; it was the number of candidates in 2016 and we do not expect less. We expect about 1.5m candidates for UTME and about 200,000 to 300,000 for the direct entry candidates.

With the existing staff strength, the existing resources you have internally, you think you can handle that?

We can, particularly now that we are increasing the capacity of the staff members. We  are also bringing in government agencies, who have the capacity to assist us, because this thing is about area of strength. The main vehicle of our service is ICT, either in conducting the exams or releasing results. That is why we are seeking the advice of experts to guide us and also bring in experts to  increase the capacity in- house. We have no problem coping with the examination.

From your stock-taking, do you subscribe to the call for the scrapping of  JAMB as being often advanced?

I believe that the wrong notion about JAMB is all in the past. There’s nothing acrimony cannot bring about, I can say this nation should be very proud of JAMB. So far, the board has performed creditably well. But what is happening is that in some cases, you have disagreement between the institutions and JAMB. Some people want to bring conflict where none exists. The law establishing JAMB specifies that the board shall be responsible for the intake into all tertiary educational institutions. Besides, the law also empowers these tertiary institutions (through their Senate or Academic board) to admit students. If you don’t give such power to tertiary institutions, it is not an institution.

With JAMB’s strides, most of these institutions still conduct post-UTME examinations? Aren’t they extorting?

It is true that some people allege that all these tertiary institutions make a lot of money from admission through post-UTME. The  question I  ask people is:  tell me of any institution in the world including Harvard and Oxford that does not make money from admission application. It is part of the normal sources of generating revenue for the institutions, what we need to address is whether those institutions are wasting, stealing or properly utilising the money. The fact that they are making money from admission is legitimate for the institutions.

JAMB exists to coordinate what these institutions are doing. Rather than fighting over territories, myself and my colleagues- vice chancellors, rectors and provosts – have agreed to work together. So, the acrimony is no longer there. They use our facilities while we also use theirs and we also work harmoniously well. I think those who were making the calls were largely voices coming from tertiary institutions prior to my assumption of office. I have met with the heads of these institutions and all of us agreed to work together. I think we have ironed out the differences. We have no reason not to work together. The candidates now benefit the more because they no longer have to go through the stress that they used to go through before they access  our services and I believe that is good for our nation.

How do you hope to handle the issue of placement. About 1.7m candidates are seeking admission in a year and at the end of the day, only 500,000 or less would get admission. What are you doing about the lifespan of UTME?

In the first leg of your question, being an applicant does not make a person qualified for admission. You should also take note that most of those candidates who applied have no results and they are not qualified because some are awaiting their ordinary level results. When you say 1.7m applicants, at least 50 percent of them do not have the ordinary level results at the time of writing the examination. And because they do not have results, even if they score 400 in JAMB, if they are deficient in ordinary level results, they would not be qualified.

Also, out of these 1.7m candidates, those who would have scores that would be above acceptable scores in JAMB will not be definitely up to this figure. When you talk of qualified candidates, we have found out that they are less than one million at any given year. If they are less than one million and we have the carrying capacity of 834,000, which is the carrying capacity of all the institutions, we would see that while it is true that we do not have enough capacity to carry, but the gap is not as wide as people are saying.

As at today, for 2016-2017 for universities, we have filled over eighty percent of the carrying capacity vacancies in the universities. The remaining 17 percent is occasioned by carrying capacity of private universities that are not filled. When you go to the polytechnics and colleges of education, the story is different. You have a large number of capacity to absorb students but they are not willing due to the unnecessary premium placed on degrees and because of that, we would have vacancies in the polytechnics and colleges of education that remains unfilled. Now we have filled over 80 percent for universities, for polytechnics, we have filled about 34 percent, for colleges of education about 15 percent of the capacity. If about 800 are qualified and as at today, we have filled over 600 for 2016/2017, the gap is not as wide as people say.

We are also going to show vividly that the popular notion is not correct, because at the end of the exercise, we are going to call for people who are qualified but who have not been admitted to find out why this is so and the outcome of that study would be very revealing because most of the people including the senate said extend validity for three years. How?

Examination that we  conduct is not an aptitude test, it is not a certification test, but it is called a screening test. A screening test is somebody who has been prima  facie qualified but you want to screen due to lack of vacancy so if you extend that for three years, you are going to complicate issues because the examination is not the type of exams that the validity can be extended. We are trying to persuade the senate and I think they would agree with us that even educationists outside the country would make a jest of the country because examination is so sensitive and technical that you cannot just extend the validity. WAEC or other examination bodies are not one chance, they don’t just sit for one examination, exams carry 60 percent, continuous assessment carries 40 percent and both are not written in one sitting, but JAMB is just one sitting, it is not an examination that can be extended because it is not designed for that. those who are knowledgeable and informed about examination and evaluation have advised the assembly that it is not done because it means you have to change the architecture of the exams.

Apart from that, if you extend the validity, we do not admit students unless you rank them, it means every year, they must be ranked. All those who were taken last year must apply so what are we saying? Again, the bill that the senate was trying to make a law says once somebody is qualified, he remains so for three years, what is the meaning of ‘qualified’? In our own trade here, nobody is qualified until such a person is registered in the university. the fact that somebody has a high score in JAMB does not make him qualified until he is offered admission. He goes for registration, 30 percent of them would be rejected at the university for not meeting its specification. If you ask him to bank for three years, ignorantly, he would think he is qualified but he’s not qualified until he has been screened by the university and found to be suitable. If you now say once somebody is qualified, he is qualified for three years, unless you are going to make the university to screen and give them a certificate of qualification.

Our examination does not make a person qualified for admission, it is a screening exam. The bill itself is defective because nobody can be pronounced as qualified. For instance, if  a candidate scored 350 in JAMB but has three passes at ordinary level, are we saying he should keep it for three years? Somebody who cleared his WASSC would have to wait while someone who has no result has been declared qualified by virtue of JAMB score which is not the primary qualification for admission. I believe we need to interact with the senators to let them realise that the thing is not practicable, it would create more confusion in the process because students would still have to register every year. Again, it’s not helpful to the student because he is not taking another examination. When a student did not read for three years and you suddenly put him in 100 level, there is bound to be problems. The intention is good but the process is wrong, what JAMB is trying to do is to eliminate some obstacles to access.

There are funny policies in Nigeria that need to be reviewed. for instance, you want to read NCE/Yoruba and the provision is a credit in mathematics. But if you go to Ghana or United States, you want to read French, Yoruba or Arabic, nobody makes mathematics compulsory, only English, which means you are punishing people.    Some of these obstacles,those  who are policy makers today as at the time did not even possess what they are presently imposing on the students. the trend in the world is to expand access, improve quality but what we are doing is that we are blocking access and reducing quality. I respect our legislators but I believe they should rely on professionals. there are certain things that are not just about law but how to operationalise them. That’s why we are calling fervently on the National Assembly not to go in that direction because the action would be counter-productive.

How far has the board gone on the conduct of the 2017 UTME?

For the UTME this year, we have taken a decision that we are going to commence the sale of the form in the next two weeks. the reason for that is that we are making all arrangements that ought to be made, in terms of payment. like I said earlier, it is not going to be any scratch card selling, students would have to pay to access. Unlike WAEC and NECO, we are not school based, we are individual based and our direct clients are the individual students. WAEC and NECO, the whole school or even the government can go and register but in our own case, every student registers individually. so we need to put the right architecture in place. We are going to conduct the exam in May. we met with all the examination bodies before fixing the date.

Will students be able to meet up with admission into their choice universities considering the time of the examination?

Our results come out within two days; because we keep the results for long, that is why whether in reality or mere perception, people are talking about upgrading so this time around, once our results come out, it will be utilised immediately and there will be no room for any manipulation.

How is the board addressing the issue of educationally disadvantaged candidates? how did the government arrive at such?

I disagree with you because even in the United States, there are affirmative actions. Some people are not perpetually kept because they constitute danger to other parts of the society. The criteria for admission had remained generally the same for the past three decades. There is the need to review, there is no doubt about that. Talking about the educationally less disadvantaged, I believe that we need to interrogate that terminology again. For instance, Kwara, if you are talking about educationally disadvantaged, you cannot call Kwara one of such, yet there are some local government councils within the state, about two or three, that are educationally disadvantaged. Lagos cannot be called educationally less disadvantaged, yet there are one or two local governments that are lagging behind,

But when you talk about educationally less disadvantaged within the admission policy of JAMB, you are talking in terms of states rather than local governments, so we need to interrogate whether actually we are not abusing the privilege of the educationally less disadvantaged. I believe that some of the things we need to do is to upgrade the facilities in such places, expand their access and make it possible for them because admission is not as important as retention, and retention is not as important as success. If people are actually disadvantaged, in some cases, it is better not to admit them at all than admitting them and sending them out after one year due to their inability to retain them. retention as it is might even be more dangerous because we might retain him in three years and he ends up with a pass degree after spending double the number of the years. So success is questionable.

What we need to do is that we must put on our thinking cap in such a way that what we intent should be synchronised with our system and policy. what we are doing now is going in one direction and proclaiming another direction. what we should do is to put our heads together like the colleges of education and polytechnics. After we have made the policy that all of them must have credit in mathematics and English, they admit students without going through JAMB. Like I said earlier, about  16 percent have registered in colleges of education but that is not the reality, those who have registered are more than 40 percent because they do not meet the national standard. they would quietly go there, register graduate and be employed because we have not synthesised our works.

Recently, you held a retreat  in Abeokuta on ICT, anything on admission modalities?

It was aimed at bringing stakeholders, including students and results of our study about how best or good we are serving the people and we are coming up with a devise, Central Admission Processing System (CAPS) that would make JAMB interface with the institutions that during admissions, instead of carrying files all around the country with the attendant risks, which is no longer the practice worldwide, we want to make sure that we interface with the institutions online, admit or refuse to admit students online.

Not only that, you would see that in the past, you will meet a large number of students in our office with one problem or another. we have dedicated a desk to that online through what we call ticketing. If you have any problem with JAMB, take a ticket, it’s free, mention your problem; as the desk officer is attending to it, the registrar is seeing the response and he can also respond or intervene at any point and will be able to monitor how good are we responding to the queries of our stakeholders and clients.

Again, another aspect is, now that we are not selling scratch cards, how are we going to ensure that the students are not extorted? that is what we are doing through vending machine. If a student buys a form, in order to be sure that he does not pay more than the stipulated N5,500 to be charged, and we want to know where he buys it from. That is why we are not using cyber cafe, any agent and so on. we are going to use the banks and our state offices to enable us identify every candidate, how much he pays, where and monitor how many candidates have paid. That would be easy not only for the management and registrar of JAMB to monitor, those who employ us should also have access to monitor what we are doing so that such will also reduce the possibility of abuse. The minister of Education should be able to sit in his office and monitor the performance of JAMB and call the registrar to ask questions. that is one of the advantages of technology. If we continue to close the whole thing as if it is native law and custom, then we may continue to have problems.

They are no doubt good initiatives,  but with the problem of epileptic power supply, how do you take care of system collapse? what backup do you have?

Some of the problems we magnify are non-existent; 80 percent of Nigerians in any part of the country today have access to mobile phone and one of the sources we are using is the cell phone. we are using mobile app, making it easy for people wherever cell phone can work, our system will work there. We are not using internet. We are also encouraging alternative source of power. before you can register a CBT centre, we are encouraging them to have solar power, even if they do not have, they would have a back up that we must certify before the examination. In any case, we do not need electricity for our own services because what we are doing is a CBT examination and every system has a UPS and once they are charged, within the 1 hour, 30 minutes period of the examination; even if there is power outage, that would not disrupt our examination. We know that there are issues of energy, we do not need much to conduct our examination.

The examination hall may be hot because of lack of air conditioner and we conduct our exams in the day time, so the issue of light is further eliminated. And we are providing our own facilities at the CBT centres, that is one of the innovations we are making. In the past, somebody can go to a village and start to register students for JAMB, that would not be possible. we are operating through our own network that you can only register at an accredited place. If you attempt to register outside the place, it would not work and we are not doing that through Internet , we are using our own network to make sure that we connect and all you need do is to register in a place on your laptop, do your biometrics and it is uploaded to us. once there’s power here, and there is enough energy to transmit, we do not require much and since we are also not passing this through the Internet.

Does that mean there won’t be special centers?

What people call special centres are not designated as such, they become special centres by accident.    For instance, if there is only one CBT centre in Ibogun or in Ogun state, students from all over would register there, they would choose that place because they know that once they pick it, they are going to that place and they make sure they arrange themselves for the purpose of perpetuating examination malpractice. What we have done this year is that we are not going to allow that, we are going to merge Ibogun with Abeokuta. If there are 20 CBT centres in Abeokuta, when we merge Ibogun, it would be 21. all those who register don’t know where they are going. You can register in Abeokuta and be in Ibogun for the exams, so that would eliminate the issue of one examination centre town, and that is what they are using. You saw what happened last year in Uromi, Edo state, we are eliminating such. Apart from the fact that those cities that are notorious malpractices, we are putting them on hold, we are not conducting our examination there and those that are one city with no problem, we are merging them with a nearby town so as to give because they are not enjoying the facility of their town, people would have blocked the facilities in the town before even the inhabitants of the town would apply. Last year, we were at Bichi and they were complaining that by the time indigenes of the town wanted to register, there was no more space in Bichi CBT centre because people from elsewhere who had plan of examination malpractice had filled the place. We can’t stop them, they are looking for one centre city, to bribe the inner of the centre because 80 percent of those registered in that centre are from the clique, but we are blocking that now by adding them. so nobody can predict where he is going. That is why we have standardised the number of CBT centres. in the past, there would be 130 here, 200 there. this time around, we have said every CBT centre should be 250. The reason for that is that we want to automate the distribution of the students. once you pick Lagos as your examination city, we would automate in such a way that it can be distributed 250 per centre.

Would that not also pose a problem of transportation and distance?

You pay a price; what we are going to ensure is that nobody travels for more than one hour. if what we would pay for sanity is for people to have little inconvenience, that is better than our examination not having integrity. People will have to go from one place to the other. there’s a town  in Osun state that is close to Akure; in the past, candidates would have to travel to Osogbo or Ilesha. We have merged it with Akure, we have disregarded the political boundaries, we are now talking about proximity in the real sense of it. For instance, Berger in Lagos and Ibafo in Ogun state. We are trying to think Nigeria, talking of what is practicable not for political expediency.

One major issue that makes crime to thrive in Nigeria is punishment. from your records, have there been cases of  prosecution and conviction?

When  I assumed office, one of the reports I got was forged admission and result slip. immediately, we announced that such should stop. those who did not were handed them over to the police and so far, within the last six months, about four persons have been convicted. We handed about five to the police and secured four convictions and now nobody is trying it again. they forged our examination results and people kept saying they are  small boys and girls but they are above 18. One of those who were convicted met me recently and was saying that he had just returned from two months prison due to the report made by JAMB and    I asked if he has been reformed. I asked about his prison experience and he described it as harrowing, but said he has learnt his lessons and would be sitting for the 2017 UTME. now, we have reduced that aspect.

We have also warned our staff that whoever allows himself to be used would be dealt with. presently, about 10 of our staff are with police for one misdeeds or the other. The fact that you are working in JAMB does not preclude you from facing the law and that is why if you commit any infraction against the law, we would hand you over to the police. Of course, majority of our staff are law-abiding but that has also sent the right signal that nobody is going to indulge anybody. once you violate the law, of course the law would be made to take its full course.

There is desperation by the candidates driven by certain factors. for example, in the past, candidates are allowed to choose first choice, second and third but now, they are restricted to the universities, polytechnics or colleges of education

We have reviewed that, candidates are free to pick college of education as first, second and third choice. You are free to choose polytechnics as first, second and third choice, it is not that your first choice must be a university, we are not doing that. But if you pick a federal university as first choice, we will not allow you to pick another federal university as second or third so as to give room for spread. If you choose a private university as first choice or a private polytechnic or college of education, you can even take another one as second choice but once you pick a federal university, no other federal university would be made available to you to choose as second or third choice. We are addressing the issue; Prof Peter Okebukola made a study for us, that interviewed the 100 level students and what they faced in the hand of JAMB and we are already working on the feedback; how do we address the feedback from the students from the process of buying forms, what are there complaints, the process of examination, what are complaints, post examination activities, what are the complaints. we are addressing those problems. One thing is that I or the management cannot promise that there would be hitch free examination because when you are doing this kind of reengineering, you cannot say that there would be no hitches, but we believe we are on top of it and whatever problems arises, we would solve. Everybody would have fair treatment.

What other measures has JAMB put in place to really tackle admission racketeering?

Admission racketeering goes beyond JAMB and we can only do what we are capable of doing. as I speak, we have made information available to security agencies, State Security Service (SSS), Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Nigeria Security and Civil Defence (NSCD) and they have been tremendously helpful because they have made a number of arrests, prosecuting those who are involved regardless of their status and we believe this would go a long way. We may not be able to eliminate the problem but we are confronting it  and you would see that it would go down drastically.

But you were once a vice-chancellor and your colleagues are in charge now. You even led vice chancellors in Africa as their president. what do you think should be the solution to admission racketeering?

To me, I believe racketeering is not limited to nigeria, it us a global phenomenon but as they address the problem elsewhere, we are also doing same within the country. The only problem in Nigeria is that we do not have enough mechanism for sanction. When a person is 80 percent sure that he would not be caught or if he is caught, he would not be punished, then he would keep committing crime but in a situation where people find out that the possibility of not being caught is very remote, they would be very careful.    Many people are not thieves because they steal, they steal because they are thieves. That is, anybody who has the propensity to commit crime would be going in that direction but only very few would be forced by circumstances to go in that direction.    Many people would say they are hungry but they will not steal, but thieves even if they are rich will still steal. so the real drive for stealing is not poverty.

With the ongoing reforms in the board and arrest of some staff, internally, you might be perceived as being too tough by your staff. How do you want to reconcile this?

Fortunately for me, people who are good are in abundance in JAMB. you don’t even come to a place because I believe i’m still a stranger here, if there is no cooperation of the staff, one would not even know where to go. People volunteer information, they come to say these are the problems, go further to say what we can do and they are ready to sacrifice. It is with the support of the staff that we have been able to carry out the reforms. that is one of the reasons why I believe that we need to improve the working conditions of the staff of JAMB because we do not need to tempt them, they are going through a lot of temptations and those who can withstand the temptations should be adequately compensated and that is where I am going by saying, let the government decide what the candidates would pay as registration fee. once it is decided, let us within the resources manage the affairs of JAMB and if we can do that, if they pay better salaries more than we presently pay, the staff would be more committed.

How do you want to address the issue of finance to conduct the forthcoming exams?

We have enough resources to conduct the exams. we have no problem at all about financing because we are making judicious use of what we have.

There is this controversy over who exercises final authority over admission of candidates, is it JAMB or universities?

For me, it is neither and it is both. In Nigeria, we quarrel over shadows. Is it about the authority or service to be delivered? the way I look at it is that JAMB is a referee to ensure equity in the admission process. JAMB does not admit somebody who is not recommended by the institutions. when an institution has recommended a candidate, that person cannot and should not be admitted unless it is approved by JAMB in order to coordinate. JAMB cannot on its own admit a student, but it can question an institution, why did you leave this can