A member of the House of Representatives, Iduma Igariwey, has insisted that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, must cancel the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.
He made the demand, describing the last examination as a “catastrophic institutional failure”;; which, according to him, has compromised the integrity and fairness of the process.
The lawmaker made the call while speaking on Channels Television onTuesdayevening.
Igariwey, who also leads the South-East Caucus in the House of Representatives, pointed out that the recent admission of error by the leadership of the board in the conduct of the 2025 UTME by JAMB was not enough to justify continuing with the entrance test.
He insisted that the integrity of the entire examination process had been compromised.
“The whole thing has lost its integrity. It has lost its fairness. People who took the time and prepared for exams were no longer in a position to take those exams,”;; he said.
“What we mainly did was to say these exams just must be done the proper way, the right way. So, that’s why we are saying that the exam has to be cancelled, so that the right thing is done in the first place.
“Because we believe that JAMB cannot just come out and say they have gone on with the exam,”;; he said.
DAILY POST reported that JAMB had claimed that a “technical glitch”;; and “human error”;; caused the issues, but the lawmaker, in reaction, stressed that the decision to reschedule the exams within 48 hours was “unreasonable and poorly thought out.”;;
“If you recall, you see that we were very restrained in taking a decision. The caucus reacted to what Professor Ishaq (Oloyode) told Nigerians on the 14th of May,”;; he said.
“He admitted to what we have described as a catastrophic institutional failure, where nearly 400,000 students who took exams in April were asked to come and re-sit those exams.
“That has never happened in the history of this country. And I’m sure it came as a shock to Nigerians.
“JAMB came out two days after— or that same day or the next day— to announce that students would have to go back to classrooms, and 48 hours after, to re-sit those same examinations. Now, those examinations were conducted on the 16th of May.
“We all got reports from our various constituencies. A lot of students could not make it to the examination halls. So a lot of people could not sit for those re-sit exams. And that was our major concern,”;; he stated.
“JAMB cannot just, after two days, set another set of exams. You haven’t even told Nigerians that you have corrected whatever led to the initial problem.
“People are calling for an investigation. People are calling for an examination of what happened. And then you have set those exams right immediately again.
“Students are unable to have access. So either they will go, and they will hear it’s not going to be in this centre again; it’s going to be in the other centre. A whole lot of people didn’t take those exams,”;; he lamented.
