In a firm statement, the Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Prof. Isa’aq Oloyede, has sent a note of warning to Nigerian parents to desist from interfering during an examination process, noting that their ward will now be held culpable if caught or reported.
Professor Oloyede made the declaration in an interview with The PUNCH Correspondent, Grace Edema.
He stressed that the board will take stringent measures against any candidate whose parents or guardians manipulate or intrude the examination process.
He said: “I do not see anything different. Nigerian students are not different. Those that are different are the parents. We have peculiar parents.
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“They are parents who will intrude unnecessarily, who want to manipulate the system, who want everything to be about them, and who are just thinking about their children and not thinking about others.
“You will see a parent, for instance, in Nigeria, who will be shouting, my child scored 305. He wanted to study Medicine at the University of Ibadan and he was not admitted.
“And he has Seven A1. That’s his self-opinion. He’s just having an unnecessarily high opinion about himself and his child.
“If your child scored 305 in a class, out of 400, he will be marked as obtainable. You are forgetting that some scored 380, 370, and 360 and your child will be ranked.
“And your child will be the best in your village but he will come out to be number 340 in Nigeria. So why are you looking at yourself and not looking at the content, the situation in which your child finds himself?
“We are taking a decision now that we will make a candidate culpable once the mother or father or the parent of that person is found to have disrupted our examination.
“We are now saying that any centre that allows a parent to get near where the candidates are being screened or being treated, that centre will be delisted.
“Secondly, we have instructed the centres to just identify the parent and the candidate, we would take a proper sanction, against the candidate. Whoever has a bad parent deserves to suffer the consequences of the bad behaviour of the parent.
“They cannot be destroying the careers of other students because of their own emotions and indiscipline.”
Reacting to the question of lessons learned by JAMB from a major scandal of result forgery committed by a JAMB candidate, Mmesoma Ejikeme, in 2023, Oloyede said: “Nothing. There was nothing to be learned from it because, from the beginning, we knew that it was false.
“We know that some Nigerians are emotional. We know that people will not face the facts. We know that people will want to crucify a public institution because they do not have confidence in public institutions. We know that we need to prove that we are right.
“I think lessons will have been learned by the candidates, by the parents, by those people jumping to the issue without verification, by those who didn’t trust JAMB, who believed that all government institutions were corrupt and guilty before being heard.
“They are the ones who learned the lesson. We learned nothing from it because we did nothing wrong. And everything went according to what we said. Those who misbehaved should have learned some lessons from what happened.”
Addressing the issue of 280 students kidnapped in Kaduna and the implications to the education sector, the JAMB registrar said: “Let’s focus our attention on how we will make sure we bring the ladies back, that is the issue now, we shouldn’t start our instructions, something has happened let’s see how we first of all solve the problem, before we now talk about, what is the implications.”
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