JAMB AND THE POLITICS OF UNIVERSITY ADMISSION IN NIGERIA

Admission into Nigerian universities has been imbued with policy inconsistencies over the years that a times creates confusion for the University administrators and even the prospective students themselves. In the 1970s, the Federal Government of Nigeria created the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to harmonise and administer admissions into all tertiary institutions in the country including Universities. The reason for the creation of JAMB is to prevent the then situation where prospective students has to apply directly to many universities, a times travelling long distances to submit the application and appear for interviews as well as the multiple admission that blocks the chances for others. It was felt that a central body that organizes a unified entrance with the possibility of issuing the admissions will eliminates some of the challenges. However over the years political consideration has been at the bane of the admission process, with policies such as catchment area, educational disadvantaged states designed to favour people from certain regions of the country. Those policies has endured but the emergence of privately owned universities purely set up by their proprietors for profit purposes has consistently attempted to assert their independence in the admission process. That has set some of these universities against JAMB which has insisted that the law governing admission into higher Universities in Nigeria gives JAMB the exclusive authority. As if that is not enough, public universities in Nigeria in the recent past came up with ideas of Post-University Matriculation Examination whereby after the JAMB entrance examination, the universities still conducts another internal examination before selecting candidates. This ideas which was soon embraced by most of the universities who uses it as a way of generating funds tended to make JAMB irrelevant in admission process. However the emergence of General Buhari a northerner as the president after the 2015 presidential elections and appointment of Adamu Adamu as Education Minister seem to have given JAMB a respite with his directive abolishing the Post-UME examinations conducted by Universities. What were the motives behind the directive to reverse to the old order? How has the Universities taking the directive? What are the roles of JAMB in the process? What does the future hold for university admission and education in Nigeria? This paper examines these issues. Data would be gathered mainly through secondary material and be analyzed using descriptive analysis.