Ezekwesili: JAMB yet to provide evidence of how south-east was most affected by glitch

Oby Ezekwesili, former minister of education, says the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the education ministry were anecdotal in their explanation of the unusual Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) result.

The results from JAMB’s 2025 UTME were released on May 9.

An analysis indicated that more than 78 percent of candidates scored less than 200 points out of the 400 maximum obtainable points.

This spurred protests that questioned the overall integrity of the examination process.

On Wednesday, Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, admitted that mistakes made by one of JAMB’s service providers led to distorted results for nearly 380,000 candidates in 157 centres across the Lagos and Owerri zone (which includes the south-east states.

In a post on X, Ezekwesili berated authorities for not immediately acting with humility by “carrying out an unbiased system check once unusual trends emerged”.

“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 5 South East States predominantly,” her post reads.

“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.”

The former education minister also shared X posts she made in 2018 and 2023 on the exam body’s processes.

“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,” she wrote.

“I will immediately reassign her to Airport Toll Gate.”