From FRED ITUA, Abuja
The Joint Action Coalition of Civil Society Organization for Transparency in Governance has condemned the recent attack on the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) by Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), accusing the union of being allergic to reforms and innovations being introduced by the Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede.
The coalition has also endorsed the on-going reforms and innovations introduced by the to ease of admission into the nation’s tertiary institutions, while also passing a vote of confidence on the leadership of the Board led by its Registrar, Professor Oloyede.
The groups said the innovations will deal with corruption in the educational sector and eradicate the problem of admission racketeering. Addressing a press conference on yesterday in Abuja, Convener of the coalition, Mr. Sabo Odeh said the position by ASUU is wrong.
According to him, the latest trick is through the instrumentality of calling for the scrapping of the JAMB. He said the reforms introduced by JAMB into admission process in Nigeria appears to have taken many members of ASUU engaged in admission racketeering out of business.
He said: “If ASUU is allowed to dictate how JAMB does it work, it is a matter of time before the lecturers set their sight on WAEC, Secondary and even primary schools.
“The clamour by ASUU that each university should be allowed to handle its own admission processes is an open call to empower these admission syndicates operated by no other persons but ASUU members.
Heeding ASUU’s ill-conceived call would send us back to the problems that JAMB was set up to solve.
“In the years that preceded JAMB, it was common to see some candidates secure admission into as many as five universities which implies that four slots would we wasted as the student can only resume in one school while several other candidates are made to wait another year at home because these slots have been wasted.”
Odeh blamed ASSU for the decay in the education sector that the country is today grappling to remedy, saying the union has lost its moral compass and does not have the capacity to challenge the reforms being introduced by JAMB.
He accused the union of frustrating interventions that would re-establish Nigerian universities as centres of excellence where youths can pass through and favourably compete with their contemporaries from any other top flight institutions on earth.
He said: “ASUU, as it did in the 90s, is giving the impression that it is genuinely interested in the well being of would be undergraduates.
We took time to study the situation with a view to ascertaining if ASUU’s intervention in the way JAMB conducts its major or mock examination is altruistic as they make it appear.
“Sadly, all that can be surmised from ASUU’s interference in this process is that they have resumed their efforts to hijack the education sector for their own purposes. Note that we say education sector because they have gone beyond their remit as higher institution teachers to dabble into academic levels that are outside their jurisdiction.”