UTME 2025: Peter Obi criticizes JAMB amid reports that candidates allegedly wrote the Exam at 6:30 am.
Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, criticized the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Sunday, April 27.
Peter Obi said the agency allegedly set the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) 2025 for teenagers as early as 6:00 a.m. while “transporting them across far-flung locations.” According to the presidential hopeful, this alleged act is “reckless.”
He shared his thoughts in a post on his X handle.
He wrote: “I came across multiple reports of students being asked to attend a public examination by 6:30 AM, teenagers, mostly around 15-17 years old, forced to travel in the dark, even in the face of insecurity, across dangerous and unfamiliar locations, because they want to get the basic right of education and sit for JAMB examinations. “Setting exams for vulnerable teenagers as early as 6:00 AM while transporting them across far-flung locations is reckless.”
He reacted on the reports are emerging of students getting into accidents and losing their young lives, some going missing, and “many more being subjected to unnecessary trauma”.
He asked rhetorically: “Who takes responsibility when a 15- or 16-year-old child disappears or is harmed while trying to access their right to education?
“This situation sadly exposes a deeper, systemic failure: Nigeria simply does not have enough universities and exam centres to cater to its youth. “Today, Nigeria has just about 200 universities for a population of over 200 million people. That alone means one university for every one million citizens, a very disturbing and staggering ratio that shows the dilapidated level of the country’s access to education.”
While speaking further, Peter Obi compared Nigeria to Indonesia,
Peter Obi added: “If we had even half of Indonesia’s educational infrastructure, which would be about 2,000 universities, the Nigerian child would not be forced into life-threatening journeys just to write an exam and still face challenges of university acceptance after performing well. “Education is not a luxury or expense, It is the biggest contributor to development for any nation, and therefore most important investment any nation can do for development.”
Recall that it was reported that JAMB commenced the conduct of the UTME 2025 nationwide on Thursday, April 24. The examination is expected to run through Monday, May 5, 2025.
JAMB is a Nigerian entrance examination board for tertiary-level institutions. The board conducts UTME for prospective undergraduates into Nigerian universities. The board is also charged with the responsibility to administer similar examinations for applicants to Nigerian public and private monotechnic, polytechnics, and colleges of education. All of these candidates must have obtained the West Africa Senior School Certificate (WASSCE) conducted yearly by the West African Examinations Council, WAEC, or its equivalent, National Examination Council (Nigeria), Senior School Certificate Examination, NECO SSCE.
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[…] to the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board’s (JAMB) statistical analysis of the 2025 UTME results, which were made public on Monday, only 420,415 […]