JAMB and the Burden of Education

By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa SAN

For the avoidance of doubt, the Board shall be responsible for determining matriculation requirements and conducting examinations leading to undergraduate admissions and also for admissions to National Diploma and Nigerian Certificate in Education courses, but shall not be responsible for examinations or any other selective processes for postgraduate courses and any other courses offered by the tertiary institutions.”

What section 5 of the JAMB Act reproduced above has done is to place the destinies of candidates in the hands of a government bureaucracy, which partly accounts for the number of youths trooping out of Nigeria for greener pastures. By including the phrase “by whatever name called” in the reference to tertiary institutions covered by JAMB, it means even universities and polytechnics established and funded by States and private entities have to go through JAMB for admission, through such mysterious criteria like federal character, educationally disadvantaged States, catchment areas, etc.

Paragraphs 27-30 of the Part 2 of the Third Schedule to the 1999 Constitution place matters of university, technological or professional education on the Concurrent Legislative List, with power granted to the States to legislate thereon. So, the issue is why JAMB has become the only institution regulating admission into tertiary institutions.

Section 10 of the Act deals with the fund of the Board of JAMB as follows:
“16. The Board shall establish and maintain a fund which shall consist of –
(a) such sums as may be provided by the Federal Government for the running expenses of the Board; and
(b) such other sums as may be collected or received by the Board from other sources either in the execution of its functions or in respect of any property vested in the Board or otherwise howsoever.”

From the above, it is clear that the primary source of funding for JAMB activities and the discharge of its functions is through government subvention and not to milk hapless candidates and their distressed parents. In reports monitored in the media, JAMB has however turned the establishment Act on its head and transmitted itself into a cash cow for the government.

From all the above, the National Assembly was right in seeking to return JAMB to its original mandate. For clarity, the Act setting up JAMB does not confer on it the power to raise funds for the government, as it is not an agency of government set up to generate revenue but rather to co-ordinate admissions into tertiary institutions.

If this can be done free of charge to the candidates who are mostly teenagers, the better for us all, rather than focusing on how much is to be declared in financial terms every year. Section 10 (a) of the JAMB Act states clearly that the Board is to “establish and maintain a fund”, which connotes a permanent and operational fund, not to be transferred or remitted.

According to the learned authors of Merriam-Webster online dictionary, to maintain is “to keep in an existing state, preserve from decline”, such that if JAMB has reached a stage that it has funds in excess after the discharge of its functions, then it should declare its examinations free for a particular period of time until the fund is exhausted to entitle it to charge fresh fees. We cannot have an institution set up mainly to assist young people to activate their careers that will turn itself into a money-spinning entity that now builds houses for its staff on the sweat of the poor masses. It is totally unfair.

Nigeria is a member of the United Nations, which has established the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), primarily to promote education for all, with a mandate to lead the Global Education 2030 Agenda through Sustainable Development Goal 4. It is prescribed by the UN that all member States shall make reasonable efforts to allocate not less than 26 per cent of their annual budget to education. This is so because the UN and indeed all of humanity now consider education as a human right.

This stems from several declarations and conventions, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which recognises the right to free, compulsory primary education for all, an obligation to develop secondary education accessible for all and an obligation to develop equitable access to higher education, by the progressive introduction of free higher education, as encapsulated in Article 26 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and replicated in Articles 13 and 14 of International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights.

Nigeria also made a feeble adoption of these goals in section 18 of its Constitution. Professor Olorode owes Nigerians a sacred obligation not to transfer this legacy of JAMB as a revenue institution to his successor. If it has become difficult for the federal government to fund an agency that works to defeat the concept of federalism, the reasonable thing to do is to scrap JAMB and allow all higher institutions the liberty to determine their admission policies based on their capacities.
Concluded.
Adegboruwa is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).