The Founder and Chancellor of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Chief Afe Babalola, has thrown his support behind the current JAMB’s war against admission fraudsters, saying that the board should be more pragmatic about its approach so as to comply with international best practices.
Afe Babalola who made this known in a statement, expressed concern about the country’s public university’s academic calendar, which most times has been affected by strike actions, thus bringing Nigeria’s education to its knees.
According to him, “For instance, all over the world, the university academic calendar is usually between September and June. But the case is different with public universities in Nigeria where the pandemic strike actions afflicting Nigeria’s educational landscape has almost become a ritual with one strike action taking off no sooner than another one that has just been called off, thereby nearly bringing the nation to its knees, educationally speaking.
“Everywhere all over the world, universities are established for learning and character. This is one of the main reasons why we whole-heartedly support the current JAMB war against admission fraudsters.”
He expressed regret about admission fraud into the universities saying, “When I was Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos between 2000 and 2007, I discovered that each time we wanted to start the semester examinations, some students usually caused trouble to ensure that such examinations did not hold. “We went into action and found that it was those who procured very high JAMB marks from ‘Miracle Centre’, but who could not cope with the space and speed of academic works that were the architects of the chaos to prevent the conduct of examinations.
“It is therefore no surprise to me that JAMB has found a whole professor writing examination for his son including accusations of some fraudsters collaborating with JAMB personnel.”
He noted that in developed countries, every university has the right to screen the candidates it wants to admit.
“It is for this reason that any student applying to study Law in the University of Oxford is mandatorily required to take the Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT), any student applying for Biomedical Sciences must take Biomedical Admissions Test (BMAT), any student applying for Chemistry must take Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA), while any one applying for Classics must take Classics Admission Test (CAT).
While expressing his institution’s concern over the delay in releasing the result of the last JAMB UTME conducted between April 11 and 18, 2019, he sympathised with parents and children whose results are being withheld because of the misdeeds of others.
“It is on this note that I will like to appeal to JAMB to do the best it could to fast-track its on-going commendable biometric verification exercise and release the results of its recently conducted examinations so that when we are combating the fraudsters, the innocent parents and children do not suffer.”