Omoyele Sowore, a human rights activist, has criticized the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), and the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) as “extracurricular bureaucratic busybodies” and has demanded their immediate dissolution.
In reaction to JAMB’s recent admission that technical glitches had significantly impacted the results of some applicants in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, Sowore made this comment on Wednesday using his official X handle.
“It’s time to do away with these pointless extracurricular bureaucratic busybodies—JAMB, NYSC, TETFund, and NELFund,” Sowore declared.
In response to a national uproar from candidates and parents, JAMB admitted to several problems with its examination procedure, including broken computers and mistakes in processing scores. His comments came after the board’s admission.
According to Sowore, the public is becoming more and more dissatisfied with the education and youth development agencies in Nigeria. These institutions have a long history of being condemned for being ineffective, corrupt, and unable to carry out their primary duties.
A new UTME session will be held for 379,997 applicants in five South-East states and Lagos, as previously announced by the testing authority.
During a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday, JAMB Registrar Professor Ishaq Oloyede addressed the problem, admitting that some applicants’ performance had been negatively affected by technical issues during the original examination.
A rescheduled examination is slated to take place this weekend, he said, and impacted candidates will get texts with instructions. A visibly distressed Oloyede took full responsibility for the failures and apologised with tears in her eyes.
“Simply put, 206,610 candidates across 65 centers in the Lagos zone (which covers only Lagos State) and 173,387 candidates across 92 centers in the Owerri zone (which covers the South-East states) were affected,” he further added.
He went on to say that the service provider’s technical staff assigned to the Lagos and South-East zones had accidentally forgotten to update some of the delivery servers when they were fixing the problem.
“I unreservedly apologize for it and the trauma that it has subjected affected Nigerians to, directly and indirectly,” Oloyede stated, expressing his sorrow for the mistakes. “As Registrar of JAMB, I hold myself personally responsible, including for the negligence of the service provider.”