Remarkable as the revenue being generated by the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) for the federal government is, the debate that has ensued over the impact or otherwise of the funds on improving tertiary education should not be surprising. It is indeed true that money being generated by JAMB is not being used, at least not directly, on universities and the polytechnics, but rather paid into the federal government Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), which ends up being spread among all tiers of government nationwide. It is equally true that the adversity that the economy is visiting on parents has tasked their purse to the limit, and increased their burden of giving their wards befitting education. Is it then possible for JAMB to enact its ingenuity to use part of the fund it generates to cushion the hardship of parents with wards in institutions of higher learning? This is what Prof. Ishaq Oloyede and his team will need to explore.
The verdict is that if JAMB can perform its duty, particularly under the Fiscal Responsibility Act so creditably, it can improvise, somehow, to alleviate the financial burden of parents and thereby impact more directly on tertiary education. While qualitative education requires adequate funding, it is, after all, a matter of public good that should not focus too much on money generation.
The recent declaration by the board that it remitted sums in the region of N50 billion to government coffers in the last six years got parents and other stakeholders calling for a review of the processes of the organisation. Many are of the opinion that if JAMB could remit so much from what parents and sponsors pay to enlist candidates for the test, it is possible to further reduce the charge, particularly now that citizens are passing through excruciating economic times.
Registrar of the examination body, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, at a session with the Senate Committee on tertiary education, explained that the remittance of funds raised from sales of University Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) forms to Federal Government started as one of the measures put in place to serve as “cost control, prevention of financial leakages and minimisation of financial corruption.”
Indeed, the current leadership of JAMB has acted well to rescue the integrity of the body after years of rapacious stealing of excess funds realised from sales of scratch cards by staff and leadership of the examination body. In the course of interrogation into one of the cases of unaccounted sales proceed at its Makurdi Office, a former JAMB staff, who could not tender facts to explain a missing N36 million, alluded to mystery snakes that spirited the money from a vault in the accounting office. So bizarre were the stories that the country’s inclusion among the most corrupt countries became heightened.
However, Prof. Oloyede moved in with speed to place a lid on the cesspit of corruption, stopping the scratch card system that was an enabler of corruption. He stepped up to fulfill Section 22 (2) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), which mandates agencies such as JAMB, West Africa Examination Council (WAEC), National Examination Council (NECO), Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), Nigeria Port Authority (NPA), and the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) to remit 80 percent of their operating surplus into the CRF. As such, excess funds that were hitherto stolen were redirected to the coffers of the government.
It was gathered that in the six years beginning from 2017, JAMB sold a total of 11.7 million forms, a breakdown of which showed that 1.7 million candidates bought application forms in 2017; 1.7 in 2018; 1.6 million in 2019; 2.1million in 2020; 1.3 million in 2021; 1.8 million in 2022 and 1.6 million in 2023.
Following public outcry in 2018, JAMB reduced the fees charged per candidate from N5, 000 to N3, 500. Despite the reduction, parents and other stakeholders still demanded further reduction in the fees to mitigate the economic challenges of the times, arguing also that if JAMB is able to remit large sums into the Federation Account, a further reduction of the cost of the examination on candidates is possible.
Education experts have recommended a reassessment of the real cost of the examination per candidate to arrive at an exact charge that will reduce excess. However, in JAMB’s breakdown of its accounts in the last six years, over N29 billion was directly returned into the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), N11 billion was disbursed on capital projects, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and savings of about N6 billion, among others. The examination board revealed that it stopped capital and overhead allocation from the Federal Government since 2017. Meaning that JAMB has taken over the funding of its activities, capital, and recurrent, a good step towards the overall reduction of public expenditure and cost of governance. Other agencies of government, particularly those charged with revenue generation should step up their game.
However, it must be stressed that the burden of funding education should not be wholly transferred to candidates and their parents. Education remains a social service for which the government cannot abdicate its responsibility.
Another area of concern is the validity period of the result issued by JAMB to candidates, which is just one year. Education experts have canvassed the possibility of extending the validity period so that candidates who are unable to secure admission with the result in the year of issuance can try again for another year or two.
The reason for this argument is explained by data. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that of the 11,703,709 applications received between 2010 and 2016, only 2,674,485 candidates were admitted across the 36 states and the FCT as the universities lacked carrying capacity to admit more candidates. It meant that roughly nine million candidates kept writing the examination for the six years.
Also, between 2018 and 2019, over 1.6 million of the 2.8 million candidates, who applied for admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions, were unable to secure placement in the Ivory Towers, polytechnics, and colleges of education.
Many candidates with good and average scores may not find spaces in the universities for sundry reasons including failure to upload their SSCE results on time and misalignments in matching scores with courses and universities’ catchment areas. A liberalised validity period could provide time for candidates to sort out these challenges without repeating the examination several times, thus saving money and stress.
The times call for more change and innovations from Prof. Oloyede’s JAMB.
The Guardian
