Why Prof. Rahamon Bello, VC, UNILAG, wants UTME scrapped
By Chika Abanobi
Scrap the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) and its Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME)! In fact, what JAMB has joined together, lets be man enough to put asunder. And, this needs to be done, urgently, if we must move our nation’s education sector forward, if we must reinvent its wheel of progress that, allegedly, began to grind slowly when JAMB was willed into existence in 1978.
This is the view being canvassed by Prof. Rahamon Bello, Vice Chancellor, University of Lagos (UNILAG), a position which had, earlier been assumed by such bodies as Nigerian Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), led by its National President, Mr. Tijani Usman, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Chief Ike Onyechere, Founding Chairman, Exam Ethics Marshal International, and The Punch newspaper, as indicated by its editorial in August, last year.
As far as Prof. Bello is concerned, the body which was established by Decree No. 2 of 1978 (amended by Decree No.33 of 1989) to, among other duties, conduct matriculation examination for entry into universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and to place suitably qualified candidates in tertiary institutions, has outlived its usefulness. It should be recalled that the White Paper of the Steve Oronsaye Committee (on the rationalisation and restructuring of federal government’s commissions and agencies) recommended the scrapping of UTME.
Bello, who was speaking when Mr. Tunbosun Ogundare, of National Mirror, and Chairman, Education Writers Association of Nigeria (EWAN) led, on a courtesy visit, an eight-man delegation comprising, among others, Mrs. Sharon Ijasan of Television Continental, (Vice-Chairman), Mr. Mojeed Alabi, of New Telegraph, (Secretary), Mr. Kelechi Ewuzie, of BusinessDay (Assistant Secretary) and Mrs. Funmi Ogundare, of ThisDay (Auditor), expressed his disappointment that with JAMB, the more things appear to “change” the more they remain the same, although Mahfouz Adedimeji, a columnist with Newswatch Times, had, sometime in August, last year, dismissed such calls as unfounded.
“Looking at why JAMB came into being (in 1978), a well known saying is likely to come to mind – “to every question, there is a surface answer and deeper one,” Adedimeji posits. “The surface answer in this regard is that JAMB was set up to ameliorate an admission system which revealed serious limitations (waste of resources in the process of administering the concessional examination, especially on the part of the candidates); coupled with fostering federal character and national cohesion among Nigerian youths.”
Such argument hardly impresses Prof. Bello. Earlier, Mr. Ogundare had, in his opening remarks, noted that UNILAG is a big stakeholder in the education sector, whose opinion should be taken into consideration in the implementation of our nation’s education policies.
“We know your (university’s) contribution in the sector, the way you produced globally-competitive professionals,” he said. “I remember sometime last year, the youngest PhD holder in Math was produced by this university. Even today, in the present administration, the Vice President (Prof. Yemi Osibanjo) happens to be an alumnus of UNILAG. Kayode Fayemi, the Minister of Solid Minerals, is also an alumnus of this university. Those are the ones we can quickly remember but they cut across various professions.”
“We are here because we felt there’s need for us to rescue Nigerian education system”, Alabi added. “The reform is highly important. Whether we like it or not, we acknowledge there’s a major challenge in the country. If we address the education system, we have addressed it. If we refused to do so, those problems will continue to be there. Today, as we are sitting here, over one million pupils are out of school in Northern Nigeria because of the Boko Haram crisis. From time to time, government tries to set up education summits in Abuja to discuss the same issues but we have only one solution: it is for the stakeholders to come together and recognise the problem. But how can that be if we keep coming here and the VC says something and we go and report and it ends there? We, a body of education reporters from different platforms – electronic, online and print, are not going to manufacture reports, stories and comments. It is from people like you who are stakeholders that we are going to get something to write about for policy makers to use as a guide to bring about the much-needed reform in the education sector.”
“How did we get to where we are in education today?,” Prof. Bello asked rhetorically. “I think that is one of the things we need to look at. Looking at the admission problem, for example, everybody wants to come to the university. It wasn’t like that, 10, 20 years ago. How did this happen? How did we remove emphasis from technical/technological and college of education system? It looks, to me, that the creation of UTME might have been part of it because before now those who wanted to go to polytechnic went to polytechnic; those who would like to take education or teaching as a vocation gladly went to college of education. But when you now say, choose a university, everybody felt, why should I go to polytechnic or college of education when I might as well go to university? That is one of the issues that has created problem for the university system.”
Bello who read mechanical engineering at The Polytechnic, Ibadan where he obtained Ordinary National Diploma (OND), before proceeding to Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, where in 1974, he obtained Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering, Master’s and doctorate degrees in the same course from the University of Waterloo, Ontairo, Canada, obviously, knows what he is talking about, having, before now, bestrode both academic worlds.
“The proportion (of the population) that go to university in any country, even in developed countries, is usually less than 25 per cent,” he explains. “The bulk of them are in the vocations and that’s why in developed world, the vocations earn more money than university graduates because they are the ones that would really do the job. They are in demand everywhere. But when you now lay emphasis on university education and not everybody is university material then you run into serious problem in the nation. I think there’s need to look at our evolution, how we got where we are and retrace and retract our steps so that we can move the nation forward.”
The EWAN team was received by Bello in the company of Prof. Duro Oni, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Management Services) and Dr. Lateef Alani Odekunle (Bursar). Giving a vote of thanks, on behalf of EWAN, Mrs. Ijasan expressed her profound gratitude to the university management for its willingness to warmly extend its hands of fellowship to the body.
This is the second courtesy visit that Ogundare would make to education institutions since he was elected Chairman of EWAN, the body of journalists covering the education desks across various media houses including print, electronic and online platforms. It should be recalled that in his first visit, to National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), late last year, the body and NOUN resolved to work together towards reclaiming the lost glory of the nation’s education sector. The university’s Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Vincent Ado Tenebe, while commending the association for its foresight and contributions to national growth and development through quality reports, noted that addressing the contradictions within the nation’s education sector without the media would only amount to futile efforts.
He, therefore, tasked journalists through EWAN to adequately enlighten the public especially on the university’s mode of operation, adding that Open and Distance Learning mode of education remains the only solution to the perennial challenge facing Nigerians, on access to university education.
In attendance at the meeting were Prof. Godwin Sogolo, member of the Governing Council of the university and former Dean of the University of Ibadan’s Faculty of Arts, and Dr. Ronke Ogunmakin, the Director of the university’s Media and Information Unit.