Former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has slammed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board for the technical glitch that affected the 2025 UTME results.
Recall that JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, broke down in tears during a press conference on Wednesday while apologising for errors in UTME results, and later announced that affected students would rewrite the exams.
Ezekwesili, in a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, wondered why JAMB did not address the earlier complaints with humility and prompt investigation.
“Why could the authorities not have immediately acted with humility and done an unbiased and swift system check once unusual trends emerged instead of immediately impugning citizens who expressed concern?
“The Ministry of Education and JAMB were embarrassingly anecdotal in their pejorative non-evidence-based explanation of the significantly unusual results of candidates in the five South East States predominantly.
“Technical matters must always be examined with professionalism and that has sadly disappeared in the toxic atmosphere created by incompetent and dishonest politicians and intellectuals who should know better,” she said
In the post, Ezekwesili shared a screenshot of her 2018 and 2023 tweets and asked social media users to draw whatever conclusion they feel on it.
In one of the highlighted photos, the former Minister called for the redeployment of the current Minister under the Buhari administration to the Airport Toll Gate in July 2018.
“If I were President and my Minister of Education concerned herself with the “revenue & remittance” of the Exam body, JAMB, rather than fixing the Integrity & Competence Testing of the Exam System, Process & Infrastructure. I will immediately REASSIGN her to Airport Toll Gate,” the tweet read.
In the second screenshot, she wrote about the controversy around the 2023 Anambra UTME candidate, Mmesoma Ejikeme, who JAMB accused of manually inflating her result and announcing herself as the top scorer for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.
Ezekwesili suggested that an independent tech investigation would uncover the truth behind the allegation.
“This saga between Mmesoma Ejikeme and @JAMBHQ requires an Independent Tech investigation to unearth all facts.
“Listening to her in this video, it is reasonable to request a forensic investigation to help reveal what really happened. I have reached out to the Registrar of JAMB.”
