By Ebube Bruno
ABUJA (CONVERSEER) – “Weep not, child. You have studied, burned the midnight candle, and think it will pay off? Wait till you meet your real exam — not the questions on paper, but the glitch on a screen, the fingerprint scanner that won’t read, the question paper that arrives at midnight.
Bring your torchlight. There will be no NEPA. If you’re lucky, they’ll give you an atupa lantern. And remember — you’re just a teenager. In Nigeria, that means you cannot protest.”
From JAMB’s UTME to WAEC’s SSCE, examinations in this country have become something between a punishment and a cruel joke.
When JAMB gleefully announced that 75 per cent of candidates who sat for the 2025 UTME failed to reach the 200/400 mark, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, smiled and called it proof that cheating had been curbed.
Again, it has happened with the 2025 SSCE. Even Alex Onyia, an EdTech entrepreneur, wonders: “How can mass failure in English and Maths be separated from students writing exams with candlesticks and torch lights till midnight?” Exactly. Why is everything upside down, Minister Alausa?
Instead of fixing the mess, you’re gallivanting across microphones and press releases announcing that by November 2026 all national exams will be Computer-Based Testing. You can’t manage paper exams without disaster, yet you want 2 million students to write essays, maths, and science on a network you can’t keep stable.
Hear me. There is a particular kind of cruelty in a nation that dangles children’s futures like fruit on a branch — then, at harvest time, knocks them off with a stick.
For years, Nigeria’s two most sacred rites of passage — JAMB’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) and WAEC/NECO’s Senior Schools Certificate Examination (SSCE) have been administered with the clumsy incompetence of institutions that have lost shame.
Let’s state the facts before temper does the talking. JAMB registered over 2,030,000 candidates for the 2025 UTME. Yet the exercise was marred by system failures: thousands of candidates could not sit exams because of fingerprint and verification errors, while 2,185 candidates were placed under investigation for malpractice and roughly 97 cases were already established. More than 10,000 results required “remedial processing.” These are not small glitches; they are catastrophic breaches of trust.
The pattern is as predictable as it is infuriating. Every examination season, we witness the same theatrical performance: grand promises of seamless operations, followed by technical glitches, server crashes, result delays, and finally, hollow apologies accompanied by assurances that “lessons have been learned.”
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The most recent act in this tragic farce is WAEC’s latest confession about technical issues affecting Mathematics, English Language, Biology, and Economics—subjects that form the core of academic advancement. The outcome is a 38 per cent pass rate, the lowest in decades.
The term “technical issues” has become the most dreaded euphemism in Nigerian education circles.
You ask, “Why does this keep happening?”
Part of the answer lies in excuses masquerading as explanations. Officials trot out technicalities — “new features,” “post-examination checks,” “validation procedures” – while the public watches children wait.
When a registrar fights back tears on national television as students cry for answers, that image should be a national emergency alert, not a soundbite to be shelved.
This is not merely administrative incompetence. It is a psychological and social wound inflicted on a generation. Imagine a teenager who studied for years, whose sleepless nights, tuition fees and family sacrifices culminate in one test, only to be told months later that the result is “under review” or worse, that an electronic fingerprint failure prevented them from sitting. The anxiety, the stigma, the lost scholarships, delayed admissions and the gnawing sense that your fate can be rerouted by a line of faulty code or an underpowered server.
These are harms that run deep. Students develop anxiety disorders, lose confidence in institutional processes, and begin their adult lives with a cynical worldview that institutions cannot be trusted to deliver on their promises and that in Nigeria, mediocrity is acceptable at the highest levels of governance. This is not just educational malpractice; it is a form of institutional child abuse that scars an entire generation!
Counsellors have seen student depression spike with a couple of them going suicidal.
Teachers are losing morale and questioning their own worth. Parents are losing faith in a system meant to be meritocratic. The casualties are human, not just reputational.
And the government’s grand solution? Education Minister Dr Tunji Alausa is stepping into this mess with an announcement that would be laughable if it weren’t so serious: a sweepingly ambitious push to force all national exams onto Computer-Based Testing (CBT) fully by 2026.
On paper, digitisation fights malpractice, and that’s an argument hard to oppose. But urgency alone is not competence. Mr Minister, this is not ambition. It is delusion masquerading as policy.
Reality bites. JAMB operates under 700–900 CBT centres for recent exercises, yet we registered over two million candidates and dozens of centres have been probed for irregularities this year. Meanwhile, only about 60–62% of Nigerians have reliable access to electricity and roughly 45% use the internet, with huge urban/rural disparities.
Consider JAMB’s own struggles with CBT despite years of experience and a significantly smaller candidate pool compared to SSCE. If we cannot guarantee smooth operations for JAMB’s UTME, what makes us think we can successfully scale up to handle the vastly more complex logistics of full CBT for WAEC and NECO in under 18 months?
Let the government stop announcing deadlines as if political theatre can substitute for logistics.
Education officials and exam bodies must stop treating the public as an afterthought. They must publish full technical audits and independent forensics of the 2025 season; release raw anonymised test metadata for independent analysts; and accept third-party audits of CBT vendor security and centre accreditation. If technicians introduced new features that caused 2,000 students to miss exams, the public deserves the full technical post-mortem, not euphemisms.
School proprietors and education managers are guardians of students’ rights. They must demand contracts that protect students: insist on mock CBT drills, insist on documented contingency plans from accredited centres, refuse to register pupils in centres that fail accreditation, and refuse complicit silence when anomalies occur.
Professional bodies and civil society (NUT, PTA bodies, student unions, ICT associations) must insist on independent monitoring and accountability.
We must see to the sack and criminal prosecution of these criminally clumsy examinations
managers.
We must refuse to accept that “technical issues” are an acceptable excuse for institutional
failure.
This is a moment for courage, not cover-ups. Let us stop normalising the ritual of blaming “technical glitches” and start demanding structural fixes. The children waiting for our exams cannot be collateral damage for bureaucratic convenience, where officials promise results and deliver mayhem.
If Nigeria is serious about merit, equity and progress, then clean exams are not optional rhetoric — they are the ledger of our nation’s moral account. We must balance that ledger now.
