By Suyi Ayodele

Dear Ajanlekoko Oriojobi Samuel (real name withheld), Reg Number: 2125512372451F. 2025 UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed.”

With the above terse message from the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the fates of thousands of Nigerians who sat for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) were sealed.

Those thousands of candidates will never see their results. Their parents or guardians, who paid the registration fees and took the candidates—children in their teens—to the various examination centres, will never know the performances of their children’s or wards.

Incidentally, those candidates did not commit any examination malpractice. They were not guilty of any crime known or unknown. Their crime was to be children of the Nigerian society that looks backwards, where other climes are forward marching!

The only crime those affected “underaged’ candidates committed was to be endowed with brains that the awkward system we run here frowns at. Their counterparts in other sane countries of the world are celebrated. But here, we are still in the Stone Age to accept that there are geniuses!

So, when Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the JAMB Registrar, came crying over the mass failure recorded for over 400,000 candidates who wrote this year’s UTME because of the glitch which affected JAMB servers, Nigerians must know that there were more issues than the computer malfunctioning Oloyede cried about. The tears of the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin were nothing but Ekún Egbére.

When two rival wives fight and one cries when the matter comes up for adjudication, my Yoruba elders have a way to qualify that. They devise a saying: Arojó sunkún obìrin, ilé níi tú (A woman who cries while stating her case tends to destroy the home) to explain the intention of such an act. The tears by the woman playing the victim are considered manipulative.

Elders who sit in judgment don’t usually pay attention to the crying woman in any dispute. They could see through her deceptive tears and her true intention — simply to gain undue sympathy. In my culture, a woman is allowed to cry as much as she wants and then asked to restate her case. More often than not, the crying woman turns out to be the guilty party.

There is a more graphic and semiotic way to qualify such crocodile tears. The Yoruba concept of “Ekún Egbére” is the apt way to describe manipulative tears by the one trying to play the victim.

Ekún Egbére means the tears of the goblin (or bush baby). Egbére in Yoruba mythology refers to a short spiritual being who goes about with a small mat, crying. The myth around the goblin, Egbére, says it cries out, looking for sympathy for its unusually small stature among the legion of ghomids created by Obatala.

It tells whoever cares to listen that the creator is unfair to it by making it the smallest of the ghomids, whereas it has more potential than any others ever created. Those other ghomids Egbére accuses of conspiracy against it. It says they conspired to dampen its potential and good work! How true?

What Egbére, however, does not tell its listeners and would-be sympathisers is the fact that its small stature has nothing to do with any heavenly factory faults. The fault is due to the goblin’s own making of rubbing the wrong lotion on its own body while it had just come out of Obatala’s furnace without waiting for the god of creativity to apply the normal lotion.

So, Egbére goes about crying, giving a false narrative to gain the people’s sympathy as the victim of Obatala’s creative abnormality! It does that without stating how it goes against the general principle of discretion and the heavenly discipline of patience and respect for public opinion.

As it is with Egbére, the crying spirit, so is it with Professor Oloyede, the Registrar of JAMB, whose conduct of the last UTME leaves the nation gasping for breath at the rate of mass failure recorded in the five states of the South-East geopolitical zone and Lagos, the Centre of Excellence!

Expectedly, heaven has been let loose on Oloyede, especially from our fellow Nigerians from the East. The noise from that region over what many considered to be a deliberate attempt to deny candidates of Igbo extraction admission into our universities, is enough to sink this federation. Most unfortunate is that the intelligentsia from the South-East joined the fray of ethnic profiling of the computer errors that occurred!

As much as I find most of the comments from the South-East over the JAMB glitch case alarming, I think the reaction speaks more to some fundamental issues about our nationhood. It is most unfortunate that 65 years after independence and an avoidable civil war where we lost over two million patriots, Nigeria is still as divided as the period we were struggling for independence. Most saddening is that no administration after the 1967-1970 civil war has brought to the fore our differences more than the current government, which began in 2015 with the administration of General Muhammadu Buhari!

It is, therefore, natural for the South-East to easily conclude that the recent JAMB misfortune was targeted at the region. The bitter argument here, which many of us are not ready to accept, is that the Igbo race has not been treated fairly by the Nigerian nation. The only unfortunate argument by the Igbo is to think that the Yoruba are their sole enemy!

And I say this without any apology, until the Ndigbo consciously realise that they suffer the same fate as other ethnic groups, they will remain largely marginalised. Until they shed the toga of Yoruba-hate-us and adopt the holistic idea that most ethnic groups in Nigeria have one thing or the other against the Ndigbo, nothing will change for them.

Should that be the case too, the Ndigbo must also look inward and ask self-directed questions as to why the race is detested by virtually all other ethnic nationalities. They must do self-retrospection to determine what in the attitude of an average Igbo man would make others dislike him.

While doing that, the Nigerian nation must also take deliberate steps to integrate the Ndigbo into our nationhood. The attitude of ‘no-Igbo-man-can-be-president’ doesn’t augur well for our unity. If the Ndigbo are not good enough to lead Nigeria, can we deliberately allow them to own their own space, their nation, where they will have no one to contend with?

This is why it is difficult to rationalise that the glitch which affected JAMB servers affected all five states in the South-East and Lagos! For people who already feel unwanted, it will be difficult for anyone to convince them to look at the issue from the angle of science and technology.

I want to put my shirt on it that if the errors had occurred only in the South-West states, no matter the sophistication of the people there, there would have been no outcry of ethnic attack on the prospects of the candidates from that region. That is due to the pseudo-federalism we practice. The North-East, North-West, North-Central and South-South would have felt the same way. The only difference, probably, would have been the magnitude of the outcry.

While JAMB has our sympathy for the unfortunate incident, I think there are some other fundamental issues we need to address here. I strongly believe that whatever happened in JAMB or with JAMB or to JAMB can be traced to just one problem: restructuring deficiency!

A lot of Nigerians have said that it is wrong to have just one body conducting examinations for both federal, state and private universities in a country that claims to run federalism! The recent claims by JAMB that it remitted over N6 billion to the coffers of the Federal Government makes the body more of a profit-making venture than a serious examination set up.

If we celebrate JAMB for making enough profit like a business venture, for the Federal Government, what about the state-funded universities? What part of that ‘profit’ goes to the private universities? Should JAMB be talking about how much money it rakes in or how effective it is in the conduct of the examinations it was established to conduct?

Take the case of the underage candidates we mentioned above. Why would JAMB withhold the results of candidates it termed “underaged” after collecting the registration fee from them? Where is that done, except in a country where roguery is the order of the day?

If the National Assembly had been alive to its responsibilities, would JAMB have had the audacity to withhold candidates’ results based on being “underaged” without any act of parliament allowing that? If a candidate purchased a form, submitted the form, was accredited and allowed to write an exam, why would the examination body send the message: “UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed” without showing the actual scores of the candidates?

Oloyede is a brilliant scholar, no doubt. He did well, so they say, when he was the VC of the University of Ilorin. But I find it difficult to believe that it did not occur to the erudite professor that some parents actually asked their children to write the examination as a mock exercise to prepare those children for when they will be of age, according to the backwards-thinking policy of age limit for admission into our universities?

Agreed cyber attack or glitch is not peculiar to Nigeria. Our major concern is how, when it happened to us, it wore a three-piece suit of ethnic colouration and age discrimination! That is the peculiarity of the Nigerian version of the global phenomenon. In Nigeria, what affects other nations comes in different shapes, shades and dimensions for us. Nigeria must always “happen” to any universal issue that finds its way to our shores!

If truly we want a restructured country with full-fledged federalism, JAMB has no business conducting examinations, for instance, for Ekiti State University or Afe Babalola University. It has no business determining the questions Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, or Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, should set for its intended undergraduates. What do we even gain from the centralised examination when a candidate with a grade of 250 marks from any of the South-West states will be denied admission to study Medicine, and his counterpart from Zamfara State who scored 180 marks will be given a laboratory coat as a medical student?

The lawlessness of JAMB at fixing the age limit for its examination against a subsisting judgment of a competent jurisdiction apes the lawlessness of the government of the day. Nigeria, no doubt, needs an effective and efficient examination body. What the nation does not need now is a weeping Chief Executive of its examination body. Ekún Egbére won’t solve our self-inflicted problem; proper restructuring will do. Maybe we should just start with JAMB.

By Lasisi Olagunju

In Yoruba, there is a proverb: “Ojú l’arí, ọ̀rẹ́ ò dé ‘nú” — literally it means ‘we only see the face; friendship does not go deep inside.’ That is the name the Group Managing Director of the NNPCL, Mr Bayo Ojulari, bears. The name calls attention to why appearance and essence sometimes wear different colours. It teaches a lesson in how names, faces and accents may be mere masks — not mirrors.

In Nigeria, the powers of power always wear tribal costumes. Every big position is a sacred grove, only the initiates have its access cards. Kinship confers initiation rights at the grove; free cakes are the benefits. For this and other familial reasons, about a month ago when Ojulari was made the boss of Nigeria’s national oil company, Yoruba people, home and abroad, danced round the world. They thought the NNPC had become their grove.

There is a town called Oke Ode in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State. Chiefs and youths of that community competed for space in newspapers, on radio and TV with press releases thanking President Bola Tinubu and their own stars for the appointment of Ojulari. They said he was their son in whom they were very well pleased. The chiefs, in particular, added, for effect, that he was “able and capable of bringing the necessary turn-around in NNPC for the benefit of Nigeria and the entire citizenry.”

But the man by himself gave a definition of himself last week. He spoke extensively to BBC Hausa in flawless Hausa language, clearly and purposively choosing and declaring where he belongs. Newspapers did English translations of what he said: “I was surprised when people said I was not from the North. I am a child of the North, and I come from Ilorin. I was brought up in Kaduna State. I started learning Yoruba when I was 15 years old. When I left Kaduna, I went to Zaria to study, so I am a northerner,” he said — and added: “I need the support of the North to do this work well and bring development to the North and the whole of Nigeria…”

What Ojulari said is a culture jolt to Western Nigerians, and I saw it in more than one critical Yoruba circle. It is a reminder that the face is not necessarily the soul. It is also a warning that a name may and may not mirror allegiance or belonging.

Three things I noted in what the man said: That he is from the North is true and the truth; Kwara is geographically north. It appears settled forever, no matter what I may think or feel. That the man is from Ilorin will be declared false by Ilorin, and held to be very untrue by the people of Oke Ode, his father’s hometown. The city he claims, Ilorin, is in Kwara-Central senatorial district; the town that claims him, Oke Ode, is an Igbomina town that sits deep in the savanna of Kwara South. Much more fundamental is this: “I need the support of the North to do this work well and bring development to the North and the whole of Nigeria.” Now, read the last clause of that sentence again. Did you see that ‘the north’ comes first before ‘Nigeria’? So, between the two which one is really his country?

In the pantheon of the gods, some deities are more worthy than others. The North is that deity who stands by you with everything it has. When you have northern Nigeria on your side, you can sleep completely and totally. No ant will dare walk your skin; rodents won’t disturb your rest. Ojulari knew this as a proven fact. He, therefore, desperately wanted the North behind him. And, with that interview, the boss man has owned the North; the North is expected to accept and own him.

I discussed that interview with a big man from the North – a Fulani businessman. I told him that the oil man did not need that ethnic part of the interview. I expected the NNPC boss to know that these are very treacherous, testy, delicate times in Nigeria. Identity in Nigeria is not a buffet; you can’t claim Yoruba before appointment and do cultural code-switching after the swearing in. What define leaders here are the name, language, tribe, religion and geography they wear. And, each of those items has an opposite; the affirmation of one quickly alienates the other.

I believe Ojulari could claim his northernness without posting a disclaimer of his ethnic, linguistic and communal roots. His interview has stomped his feet on the eyes of that part of the earth which calls him son. The language and tone of the interview suggest his mother tongue is a footnote; an afterthought that came after 15 years. His hometown, Oke Ode, did not even feature at all in his story as told by him. I hope his Yoruba is strong enough for him to understand that rain beats one into the same house more than once. He can still make quiet amends.

A lesson: Butterfly gazed at her reflection in a clear pond and said, “These wings are too grand for an insect—I must be a bird! I am a bird!”

Butterfly convinced herself and stopped associating with insects; she opted for the assembly of birds.

In his majesty, the eagle arrived the next meeting of birds. He spotted butterfly and queried her:

“Why are you here?”

Beautiful butterfly replied: “I have wings like you. I fly. This is where I truly belong. I am a bird.”

The eagle smiled, patted butterfly on the back and gently told her: “You are truly beautiful, but you are not of our tribe. You flutter, we glide and soar. The world may keep praising your beauty but you should never let achievement, praise and adulation make you forget who you truly are.”

So, the Hausa-speaking Yorubaman who started learning Yoruba at the age of 15 should listen to the elders when they warn his butterfly never to think itself bird. Achebe’s Ikemefuna called Okonkwo father. We all know how fatal the boy’s run for cover turned out in his ‘father’s’ arms. May be I should kuku read out that part of the story: “As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’, as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down…”

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Oseloka H. Obaze

Nigerians rarely take pride in their incumbent leaders. They have good reasons not. As a sixty-five years old nation, Nigeria has never been blessed with a leader, who Nigerians freely elected and loved for his charisma, ideology, vision or disruptive thinking; or for being an unrepentant patriot who imbues a deep sense of patriotism. Nigerians never had a Nelson Mandela, Jerry Rawlings, Julius Nyerere, or Thomas Sankara. We covet being like Singapore, but have never produced a Lee Kuan Yew. The fault is not in the nation’s God endowed destiny, but in those who choose third-rate leaders and their acolytes, who follow such bad leaders blindly.

Our national bane remains bad leadership. We continue to pay for it. Still there’s plentiful evidence that Nigerians are resigned to electing compromise candidates to public offices. In return, they have infinitely paid the high price of such poor leadership. Thus, Nigeria’s perverse politics and associated comeuppance is not so much the fault of the leaders as it is of the followers. Because Nigerians never elect seminal leaders, inefficient governance becomes the norm, as they opt for sectionally preferred leaders, who though they meet the compromise criteria, are hobbled by partisan clientelism.

Nigerian leaders become heroes only after they die. Being leadership heroes and legends in their lifetime is a rarity and that reality is toxic to good governance. These facts impact on our national development and good governance credentials.  Also, our poor governance statecraft has domestic and international implications. Domestically, our youths are being radicalized nationwide. Traveling abroad with a Nigerian passport tells the pathetic story.

As a nation, Nigeria has carved a niche of providing new indices of underdevelopment.  Recently, as the Economist magazine was disclosing that “Nigeria has more people without electricity than any other country” and that “fixing that will be fiendishly difficult,” Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Alliance (APC), brazenly avowed that there was nothing wrong with Nigeria being a one-party state, since China a one-party state was developmentally well off.  Well, what percentage of the people in China has electricity?  100%. Conversely, our non-salutary story is that the presidency is going off the national electricity grid and resorting to solar power. Was the announcement supposed to be a confidence-building measure? What electricity fate awaits Nigerians? Such dubious and contentious comparison coming from a prominent political leader overlooked a notable corollary: in China corrupt politicians and public officials are executed. Same should be true for Nigeria in order for Ganduje’s comparison to be valid. 

The consequences of Nigeria’s poor governance are sorely felt, when bad leaders make frivolous and tactless comments aimed at blanking out or justifying prevailing ineptitudes. The political opposition has enough arsenals to rubbish the APC government as being apathetic and incompetent. Take for instance our budgetary accounting. There is nothing more emblematic of fuzzy math and corruption, than when we don’t know the barrels of oil we produce daily or quarterly; or how much oil is stolen. On both counts, the figures emanating from the CBN, the Ministry of Finance and NNPC are frequently at variance. Concerning our national deficit, at the close of 2024, the Ministry of Finance had it pegged at N6.6 trillion; the World Bank at N10.5 trillion and the CBN at N14.7 trillion. DMO figures were astronomically higher. The only commonsensical deduction is that as a nation, we are badly leveraged and criminally indebted. Still, we continue borrowing for non-regenerative ventures.

The bucket list of what constitutes good governance is short.  Benchmarks of good governance are also few and easily achievable to provide an elongated value chain of dividends of democracy. Regrettably, as Nigerians, we play politics for the sake of politics, not for the sake of good governance or entrenching true democracy.  Our leadership elite do not play politics as the grounding norm for good governance.  They play politics to belong, to be in the corridors of power and to cash in. 

Good governance is not rocket science.  It will never be. But like democracy, good governance is hard work fostered by discipline. Good governance demands strict respect for the rule of law. So we have to work hard at it in order to fix our politics.  In a presidential system like ours, the separation of powers is imperative. As such, we must resolve to entrust our national interest chores to those with the capacity and commitment to serve.  We must also grasp that the enablers of good governance consists of the leaders, the people and the national institutions.  These are the pivotal operatives. Each has a critical, consistent and resolute role to play. Weak leaders, weak institutions and weak people cannot produce a robust government, society or sustainable development.  To wit, they cannot produce a vibrant democracy. Yet, working together they can be adaptive and transformative. They can orchestrate an orderly and productive society.  

Nigerians are not blind to their leadership challenges. Oddly enough, they are also not averse to holding on doggedly to “blind hope,” which according to the tragedian Aeschylus translates to “we are living and partly living.”  The manifestation of “blind hope” is now a national curse. To paraphrase a public policy interlocutor, “blind hope is a curse to every human, and every nation.” Most Nigerians are living dead or walking dead; thanks to our political rut and rot. Food and physical insecurity are rife. Healthcare delivery is a disaster. To paraphrase Pope Leo XIV, most Nigerians are “fed up with scandals, misused powers,” so much so “they no longer believe, no longer hope, and no longer pray because they think God has left.”  Indeed, most Nigerians believe God already left Nigeria to her own proclivities and detriment; considering the Pandemonium’s Paradise that Nigeria has become.

When Obu Udeozo avers in a poem in his seminal 2021 anthology titled, GOD–Selected Poems, that “…Ministers, governors, and senators of earthly pleasure, harvest copious dividends of unforgiving flames..;” he unfurls the insidiousness of statecraft that our present leaders serve, invest or bequeath on their constituents. Nigerian leaders rank high in the realm, where rhetoric, “prejudiced and loud communication” of failed policies and governance modalities drown out free speech and the aspirations of the “gathering of the voices of the weak who that have no voice.”  Nigerian leaders contrive poverty, hunger, insecurity and death as choice dividends of a presumed democracy. We now also attribute evident maladministration in INEC elections results and JAMB results to “glitches,” despite the respective institutional commitment to “free, fair, and credible electoral process,” and “service and integrity.”

Nigeria ambled into the status of a lawless nation long ago; not because there are no laws, but because there are no consequences for those who break the law regardless of their status.  The alarming adjunct is that our law enforcement institutions -judiciary, police, state security and paramilitary agencies- are all weak. We can now even add the military to that cadre. In its proper context, our unlawful inclinations and becoming a nation of scofflaws can be explained by the epigram in Khalil Gibran’s book, The Prophet, wherein a question was asked: “But what of our laws master? And he answered: You delight in laying down laws. Yet you delight more in breaking them.”  

We have other fault lines. Canvassing for full adherence to the rule of law and due process in a democracy does not consist of rhetoric, sound bites and propaganda. Good governance advocacy must speak to commitment and core values of democracy, complete with the checks and balances and total respect for constitutional dictates. These are anchored by the state’s unfettered service delivery and equal protection for every citizen. Sadly, our leaders gloss over these values. Nepotism has reached a new high. Preferential and discriminatory policies now induce cancel culture.

As we approach the 2027 general elections, we have entered a season of anomy. Defectors and defections are the norm.  Non-subliminal APC Presidential Campaign billboards now glut the nation. President Bola Tinubu’s second term campaign is visibly on. All these violate the extant Electoral Law.  But what does it matter? Financial profligacy is also on the rise. What galls the most is that the present leadership has appropriated the rights of approbation and reprobation. That is not a benchmark of good governance.  Years back, when Nigerians were perceptibly bedeviled by severe austerity due to poor governance, Nigerians protested under the rubric of “Occupy Nigeria.” Now that the economic and security conditions have worsened, all forms of protestation, which ought to be routine, has been muted.  Courage is on high demand. Yet courage has a deserted Nigerians as repression and reprisals manifest. The disunited political opposition seems cowed. Their complacency abets APC’s impunity.  

Some suggest that it’s no longer worth writing; protesting or speaking up o the ills of Nigeria as those in power neither read nor listen. I disagree. We must continue to harp on key national interest issues and challenges. We must also continue to offer possible, probable and plausible solutions. We must continue underlining that good governance is not rocket science. As such, those who can’t lead should get the hell out of the way in the national interest. Let those who can do the job lead for the common good and in the national interest. 

——

Obaze is MD/CEO, Selonnes Consult – a policy, governance and management consulting firm in Awka.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.