Peter Obi has commended the registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Ishaq Oloyede, for admitting to glitches in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) but said such errors should be avoided in the future.
Oloyede had, in a rare admission while fighting back tears, said some errors affected candidates’ performance in the examination, which was conducted across the country earlier in the year.
Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 election, while lauding Oloyede for admitting to the mistakes, said efforts should be made to prevent a similar recurrence.
“His open admission of fault and the expression of deep remorse stand out as a rare but commendable display of accountability in our public institutions,” Obi wrote on his X handle on Thursday about the entrance examination into tertiary schools, saying it “raises a very concerning issue on glitches and the grave havoc it’s creating in our country, even in critical institutions like JAMB”.
“There must be no room for further glitches – not in JAMB, not in any arm of government. The cost of repeated failure is simply too high,” he said.
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‘Emotional, Psychological Toll’
The former Anambra State governor said JAMB’s willingness to own up to its shortcomings is worthy of recognition, but “the incident has brought to light a far more troubling reality: the persistent fragility of our institutional systems”.
“The emotional and psychological toll on students, and even parents, some of whom have reportedly suffered severe trauma, and in heartbreaking cases, even death, serves as a reminder of what is at stake,” the LP chieftain said.
“The integrity of examination processes and the reliability of public institutions are not optional; they are foundational to any nation’s progress.”
He called on JAMB and other similar agencies to “adopt comprehensive quality assurance frameworks”.
The LP chieftain listed these to include “rigorous testing and constant auditing of technical infrastructure,” asking for “transparent communication with candidates and stakeholders” among others as “essential to restoring public confidence”.
During the press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday, the JAMB registrar said, “It is our culture to admit errors because we know that in spite of the best of our efforts, we are human; we are not perfect”.
He announced that about 379,997 candidates in the just concluded 2025 exercise would retake the examination.
His admission followed an outrage and outcry over technical glitches, unusually low scores, and alleged irregularities in the questions and the answers in the 2025 UTME.
That prompted JAMB to review the conduct of the examination after establishing that a technical glitch affected 157 out of the 887 centres.
A breakdown of the 2025 UTME results by the agency had shown that over 1.5 million of the 1.95 million candidates who took the examination scored below 200, prompting outcry from Nigerians.
