The South-East Senate Caucus has come out strongly against the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), condemning what they describe as a deliberate move to sabotage the academic future of students in the region.
In a statement released in Abuja on Saturday, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe (APGA, Abia South), who chairs the caucus, decried the recent UTME glitch that affected nearly 400,000 candidates, mostly from the South-East and Lagos, as “curious and suspicious.”
The senators linked the issue to “injecting hateful politics and narrow parochial considerations in both policy enunciation and its implementations.”
They raised alarm over what they termed a potential conspiracy.
“It would be disheartening, and we hope not to contemplate such a conspiracy theory, that there is a narrow agenda being pursued to deliberately shortchange and harm the future of our children,” the statement read. “The so-called glitch, as curious and suspicious as it was, is enough to erode confidence and dangerously lower national pride among the future generation.”
They called on national education authorities to uphold fairness and avoid actions that could further deepen national disunity. “The relevant national education drivers must recognise the inherent danger of injecting hateful politics and narrow parochial considerations in both policy enunciation and its implementations,” the caucus warned.
Referencing the concentration of the technical glitch in the South-East, they demanded explanations from JAMB.
“That the glitch happened in the whole of the South-East raises pertinent questions that must be answered by JAMB to assuage the growing frustrations and fears among the people of the region, particularly the children who are directly at the receiving end. We must pursue a Nigerian agenda and not a narrow one that will ultimately injure national unity.”
The senators emphasized the critical role of education in development, warning against politicizing it.
“Education remains one of the most important bedrocks of any society’s advancement. It is one major index of development in every facet of life that can never be faulted. Education is a major pivot that triggers national development. Every child is entitled to it; therefore, we must not play roulette with it,” they concluded.
JAMB had earlier confirmed that 379,997 candidates in Lagos and the five South-East states would need to retake the UTME due to technical irregularities.
During a press briefing in Abuja, JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, admitted the board’s shortcomings and announced a rescheduled exam.
“After the mock examinations this year, we reviewed our LAG (which includes South West and South East states as earlier indicated) and KAD examination engines. We realised that in the LAG category, options to the items of our examinations were not shuffled. We insisted that the shuffling must be effected,” he explained.
“After this was done, we tested the update as usual and we were satisfied. We thereafter still did what we call dummy, a simulation, a day before the examinations and everything seemed to be okay. In other words, we believed we were ready to deploy the items after some layers of testing the processes,” Oloyede added.
The registrar, visibly moved during the briefing, accepted responsibility and apologized for the disruption.
Meanwhile, legal pressure has mounted on the board.
A law firm, John Nwobodo & Associates, reportedly sent a formal request to JAMB demanding the release of the 2025 UTME questions and answers for over 1.5 million candidates who scored below 200.
Representing 1,534,654 candidates, the firm cited concerns about software errors, especially given that over 70% of students failed to meet the benchmark.
