Unfinished business (2)
By Steve Nwosu ( e-mail: styveng@yahoo.co.uk)
President Olusegun Obasanjo last week, threw his weight behind the post-JAMB
exam. And, I guess, that puts paid to the controversy over the vexatious exam.
So it stays.
But I doubt if this controversy is one that would go with just another presidential
prononcement. So, even as Obasanjo has ruled, this post-JAMB thing remains an
unfinished business.
For this week, therefore, I have decided to leave all the talk about third term,
the harrasment of Buba Marwa and all to face education. I am turning a blind
eye to the fact that Gbenga Obasanjo has turned his father’s spat with
Vice President Atiku Abubakar into a family fight. I am taking no notice of
whatever money that has been voted to an imaginary Mantu committee. I am also
not going to use today to call for the arraignment of all those who annually
make it impossible for our pilgrims to be airlifted to Mecca. That will be for
another day.
Let us also leave Ladoja and Adedibu to cancel themselves out. If they kill
themselves in the process, it’s all well and good. If they wipe out everything
in Oyo State with them, we will deploy other Nigerians to go and live there
and become the new sons of the soil. My people say that a sensible person does
not need anybody to tell him not to engage in a street brawl.
The first time the reality of what is going on with our university matriculation
examinations hit me was way back in 2001 when a friend who had abandoned school
for almost 18 years turned up in my office saying she wanted to return to school.
Naturally, I was excited. I was one of those who had been trying to convince
her all these years to go back to school, especially, since the government contracts
and men friends that lured her out of school have all dried up, leaving her
barely scraping to survive. However, I was taken aback when she announced that
she intended to take JAMB. She had left school in Form Three, so where does
the JAMB bit fit in? Well, she said I should just pay the exam fee as my contribution
and leave the rest to her. My gladness, however, transformed into shock when
she said the fee was N10,000.
Not even now that the cost of everything has gone through the roof has JAMB
started charging N10,000 for its form. And I knew the price then was just about
N1,500. But I had agreed to pay all the same, telling myself that she’d
probably use the difference for her extra—mural classes. I asked her to
come back for the money in another three days so that she’d beat the deadline
for the submission of forms. But she told me that the time for submission had
not come yet and that she would not be needing the money until another four
weeks.
The N10,000 was actually for a ‘Special Centre’. They would wait
until JAMB completes the entire registration exercise and then, they would pay
money to some smart guy who operates a Special Centre. With the forms arriving
late, JAMB would not have any other choice than to allocate an official Special
Centre to this smart guy. Why would anybody opt to write his exam in such a
centre, with all the known risks of cancellation, when he has the chance to
register and take the exam at a proper centre? That was when I got the education
of my life.
Of course what happens at the special centres is now an open secret, but suffice
it to say that the candidates who take their examinations there are the ones
who often score very high. It is immaterial that most of them don’t even
see the JAMB question papers. They only get the answer sheets to sign in their
names. The rest of the job is left to the centre operator. So, in the end, you
see candidates who cannot conveniently write their own names in small letters
without mixing them with capital letters scoring 280, 270, 310 etc.
You see people who cannot define demand and supply scoring 80% in economics
while their counterparts who cannot tell a beaker from test-tube come out with
90% in physics and chemistry. In the process, they take up admission slots that
could have gone to genuinely brilliant candidates who would probably have scored
230, 240 etc.Of course, it is this situation that has seen every university
and polytechnic now organising post-JAMB screening for candidates cleared by
JAMB for admission.
Towards the end of last year, I expended about N20,000 in fees and logistics
to enable three kinsmen travel to write the post-JAMB examinations in their
universities of first-choice. And as I write, two of the candidates have yet
to know their fate. Nobody has told me what the two candidates scored –
or whether, in fact, the results have been released in the first place. Rather,
what I am hearing is that there is one non-academic staff in one of the universities
who could ‘work’ admission for one of my wards – irrespective
of what he scored in the post-JAMB exam.
His asking price is N40,000. Unfortunately, everything has been passed on to
me through a third party. When I confronted the man, he said nothing about money
nor how he swings it. All he said was that the results had not been released
and that what he helps people to do is to simply check their results.
When I came back from that meeting, my wards were livid with me. They are now
accusing me of spoiling their chance of getting admission – even as I
neither wrote the JAMB exam nor stood in for the post-JAMB screening.
With the benefit of hindsight, I am told that I should not have gone to see
the man. That I should have stayed in the background and asked for the bills
from my wards - with whom the supposed linksman is more comfortable. But the
truth was that I wanted to see how the man would look me in the face and ask
me to bring N40,000 so that he could secure admission for somebody whose score
he did not know – or care about. But if I was ‘bad business’,
I doubt if many others eager to push their children into school would be as
bad a business. If they were, this non-academic staff would have since closed
shop. But he’s still in business, apparently.
But, in spite of the president’s position on the matter, my view is: if
JAMB can no longer properly screen candidates for the tertiary institutions,
what then is the need to continue to keep the board? That is the question the
universities would want me to ask. But I won’t ask it.
Now that the schools have started this test, has it not only seen the “settlement
point” relocating from special centres and JAMB office to the universities?
At the end, would admission still not go to the highest bidder?
While not exonerating JAMB, I think the schools can do more to check the fraud
than just organise another round of fraud-prone post-JAMB exam. That is where
we get back to the question: When did universities lose the right to kick out
under-performing students?
If a candidate knows that he would be caught out in the university when he fails
to live up to expectation, he would not likely go through all that they go through
these days to get admission.
That also brings up another question: How do these misfits eventually graduate?
Who are those that sleep with them to award them ‘A’ grades? Or
do all of them join cult groups to intimidate the lecturers to pass them? Who
are those that allocate money to every grade?
That is why I believe post-JAMB exam will not solve the problem. Like in many
other sectors, the problem here is not policy. It is the absence of will to
implement laws. The problem is that people who don’t give a hoot about
education have come to power and turned everything upside-down. They replaced
them with weird substitutes that encouraged our children to study less and get
the same certificates. Now, we are paying the price.
The result is that people now come to look for employment hugging all manner
of certificates: NECO, GC4, G-II, RSA, RSM, STAT, CFOL – just anything
to bypass the good old WAEC GCE. Those who can’t pass WAEC and don’t
want to believe that God did not plan it for all of us to pass WAEC, still go
round to all manner of night schools and all manner of mushroom institutes to
patch certificates together – including those that admit people with two
credit passes for all courses.
One girl whom a friend had sent to me the other day to see if I could fix her
up went back to report that I was too proud. Her reason: that I did not even
take time to listen to her. But the real reason, which she was probably too
daft to pick out, was that I did not know what to make of the four paper qualifications
she was waving in my face. I did not see a degree I could vouch for.
I did not see a recognizable diploma or even a GCE. I did not also know the
GCE equivalent of any of the certificates. I could not place any degree-awarding
institution at the Ikotun area of Lagos – especially as I lived in that
neighbourhood for almost five years. To make matters worse, she spoke a mixture
of pidgin and college slangs, dotted here and there with a few recognisable
English words - and many more ‘new englishes’ that my old Michael
West dictionary has just refused to list.
At a stage, I suspected that I was the one getting rusty, and probably too freaky
about paper qualification. So, in order not to miss the opportunity of hiring
a good hand, I asked her to put what she wanted to say in writing, by way of
a formal application. That ultimately took the cake. Or what would anyone make
of an application that concluded by saying that "it is an a big honour
for me to employ in your widely redd news paper". Of course I got confused.
Forget the ‘redd’, was this an application or a job-acceptance letter?
Was she looking for employment or for somebody to employ?
After three consecutive cancellations, she finally wrote down both ‘a’
and ‘an’ – I guess, her intention was for me so select which
one that should grammatically precede ‘big honour’. I’d have
thought this was a slip, but for the fact that she wrote and cancelled it three
times before settling for that ingenious option. What manner of teacher did
this one pass through?
Of course she was dressed to kill. Temptation on two legs.
She could have walked out of the pages of the latest Vogue magazine. So beautiful
that even the most incurable of womanisers might, on sight, not quickly summon
the courage to even woo her (I guess I should say, ‘toast her’ –
that is the word that makes meaning these days). She wore one of those tops
that seem to be eternally scared of the belly-button. Hers was so scared that
it stopped a clear three inches above the belly-button. This sinful top was
sitting atop an even more sinful pair of trousers.
That one only managed to rise above the waist-line. The mid-riff was all bare.
I sarcastically told her that she fitted perfectly for a job on the hotel lobby,
but she mistook it for a compliment and gave me this smug giggle as she said
‘thank you’.
That was it. I had had enough. And I sent her away, telling her in no uncertain
terms that I did not want to see her again. If this garbage got past JAMB, how
did it get through university?
We have heard of all manner of people buying JAMB forms – including those
who did not even pass their Common Entrance examinations. Everyone wants to
go to the university. People finish primary school, go to a sewing school and
then buy JAMB form, score 80% in courses nobody taught them at the sewing school,
head to the university, spend the entire school period playing ‘aristo’,
come out four years later with a bachelors they do not know what the 2:1 in
it stands for.
Surely, that’s not all JAMB’s fault.