JAMB - Help Akachukwu Onyiuke
Sometimes, Nigeria does not inspire me. One of Nigeria’s finest young men in his generation with 9 straight A1s, in WAEC, is being prosecuted by JAMB because his score in JAMB was too good to be true. Nigerian government is throwing stones, rods and everything on Akachukwu Onyiuke, claiming nonsense on biometrics mismatch as though there are many mercenaries that could have scored his number in Nigeria today! Wait - he is largely going to be done with Nigeria soon: Canada, UK and America. That is how we deal with our best.
There seems to be no end in sight as the face-off between the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and Akachukwu Onyiuke, the whiz-kid, who obtained 9As in the May/June 2019 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), has taken new dimension.
The 17-year-old Anambra State indigene has asked the Registrar of JAMB, Prof Is-haq Oloyede, to review the CCTV at his exam centre to ascertain his claims of following due process before entering the hall to write the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). He also challenged Oloyede to prosecute him if he has evidence that he entered the exam hall illegally to write the UTME:
I am not as half-talented as this boy but many of us went through this mayhem. I got admitted into FUTO but magically JAMB changed the admission to UNN because UNN said I must attend it for my scores! It took me going to JAMB HQ to protest that I would never like to be a lion (lol) before I was liberated to stay a FUTOite.
Please JAMB, save this boy.
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Apparently JAMB is more at home with some of us - the average candidates, which had to sit for UME and re-sit till they got used to our faces, and then let us go...
The problem is when you ask average people to supervise or lead super talented younger ones, everything seems too great and overwhelming in their eyes.
What if after all the brouhaha it's proven that the young man owns the scores, how will JAMB compensate for the trauma he has been through?
Everything is impossible or extremely difficult, until someone does it. When mediocrity reigns supreme, the outliers or brightest minds become witches and wizards...
Not just Governments, Universities will be on his tail just as future employers but not here. I have argued that parts of our education contents of should change into re-orientatoin where excellence is celebrated rather than mediocrity.
