The apt and timely reaction of the federal government in overruling the embarrassingly obnoxious new policy of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is a great national relief; not only for the numerous parents and their wards who are directly, negatively affected by the policy but by the entire nation. The prompt action of the Buhari administration in putting on hold this strange policy, following a briefing by the Federal Ministry of Education’s Permanent Secretary, Macjohn Nwaobiala, is salutary, manifesting the government’s responsiveness to the general national outcry against the largely unwelcomed policy.
In its wisdom, or apparent lack of it, the board of JAMB decided to bring out a policy to address a situation that may have become worrisome, whereby many students are unable to gain access to the universities of their first choice because the universities have surplus candidates seeking admission to it beyond their carrying capacities and/or beyond their allotted capacity by the National Universities Commission (NUC).
In its effort to address this problem, JAMB brought out this new policy with effect from this admission year at its combined adopted policy meeting. The policy is to reallocate candidates who apply to universities where there are already an overload of candidates for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in those particular courses to other universities that have spaces for those courses and can therefore absorb those candidates. This policy amounted to solving a problem by creating a more difficult problem, what you may describe as prescribing beheading a patient with a headache as a panacea for his ailment.
The intention of JAMB is, admittedly, well-meaning but the outcome is unwholesome, for a number of reasons, one of which has led to the outcry which first emerged from the University of Lagos. One, universities already have the list of candidates forwarded to them by JAMB and ordinarily should qualify to write the post-UTME screening exercise, a pre-requisite for gaining admission to the universities. However, as a result of JAMB’s new policy, candidates who did not apply for courses in a particular university will now be unilaterally reallocated to that university, with the effect that certain candidates who apply to the university and who may have met both JAMB’s and the university’s cut-off marks may/will not be admitted to the courses in their university of first choice.
Additionally, candidates who did not initially apply to those programmes in the university and probably do not meet the institution’s programme requirements may be inflicted on the university. For instance, a candidate who scored 270 to read, say Law, at the university of Lagos may not be admitted to that university to read Law, while another student whose first choice may be to, say, Covenant University or Benue State University and thus did not apply to the University of Lagos may be reassigned to that university.
More disturbingly is the material aspect of this policy. There will certainly be circumstances in which students who apply to federal universities and meet the cut off scores to those universities, in virtue of this new policy, may not gain admission to the federal universities of their first choice but are assigned to states or private universities where the fees are definitely higher. In cases of students from impoverished background and who cannot afford the tuition and other fees of the states and private universities will, inexorably, and due to know error or failure on their part, be unable to access university education for that year or, indeed, for aye.
This is a clear case of injustice and inequity with injurious implications for numerous candidates and their parents who may fall victim of this policy. On the other hand, there are students from financially solvent backgrounds who, prefer to study in private institutions for some reasons other than pecuniary but who may be denied the opportunity as a result of this policy. Ordinarily, there will be little sympathy for candidates in this category but they have democratic rights to choose to study in high fee-paying institutions and should not be denied the right if they meet the admission requirements of the institutions of their first choice.
As a result of these implications and many others that space does not allow us to interrogate here, the decision of the federal government withholding the implementation of this policy and directing candidates that have made the “official cut-off marks to proceed to write the post-UME examinations” in their institutions of first choice and later screen for their second choice where expedient, is commendable and greatly relieving.
Obviously, this decision is an interim measure as this decision to stem the emerging crisis from the board of JAMB’s policy does not solve the problem arising from the various difficulties attending various kinds of ‘crisis of access’ to university education, one of which JAMB sought to address. The truth is that, for various reasons students would rather seek admission to some universities and their programmes rather than others. Some of these reasons may be the adjudged standards and quality of delivery and therefore end-products of attending those universities. Other reasons may be the adjudged stability in the calendars of these universities. Others, still, may be affordability in terms of costs of studying in certain universities.
There is also the fact that, there is, ostensibly, adjudged over-supply of accesses to university education based on the numerous universities available in Nigeria nowadays. Yet, there is still the problem of inadequacy of tertiary institutions (I think more of insufficient spaces) for the teeming population of qualified candidates seeking admission into them.
As things stand today, with the undeniable need for massifying access to tertiary education, less than 40 percent of students who write, and meet the cut-off marks of, JAMB are able to access any Nigerian universities. Some available universities, especially the private ones, are over-prized, beyond the means and reaches of the children of the poor who are in the majority. These are worries that the governments in Nigeria need to frontally address in a knowledge world and society where education (and man-power, human capacity building generally) is the principal instrument of development.
