South-East Senators Lambast JAMB: Your So-Called UTME Glitch Is Agenda To Harm Our Children's Future | Sahara Reporters
The senators attributed the situation to “injecting hateful politics and narrow parochial considerations in both policy enunciation and its implementations.”
The South-East Senate Caucus has blamed "hateful politics" for the recent Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) incident, which led to about 400,000 candidates needing to retake the examination in the region.
The senators attributed the situation to “injecting hateful politics and narrow parochial considerations in both policy enunciation and its implementations.”
In a statement issued Saturday in Abuja by its Chairman, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe (APGA, Abia South), the caucus alleged a conspiracy aimed at harming the future of the region’s children.
"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."
“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.”
"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."
"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," the statement added.
Earlier, SaharaReporters
JAMB Registrar, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this during a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday, acknowledging that errors during the initial examination negatively affected the performance of some candidates.
Oloyede revealed that affected candidates would be sent messages with details of the rescheduled examination slated for this weekend.
The registrar, moved to tears, issued an apology and said he takes full responsibility for the lapses recorded in the examination.
He said, “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."
“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."
The decision to allow rewriting of the examinations came after intense pressure on JAMB from Nigerians and various stakeholders.
SaharaReporters had earlier reported that JAMB received a formal request from a law firm, John Nwobodo & Associates, demanding the release of the 2025 UTME questions and answers for over 1.5 million candidates who scored below 200.
This followed concerns over the examination’s unprecedented failure rate, which saw more than 70% of candidates scoring below the 200 pass mark.
The law firm, which said it was representing 1,534,654 candidates, raised the alarm about potential discrepancies in the results, suggesting a possible malfunction in JAMB’s software.
