Nigerians across the country have taken to social media to express outrage and disbelief after the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) admitted that technical glitches compromised the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in 157 centres.
The Board’s Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, made the admission at a press conference in Bwari, Abuja, triggering a wave of condemnations, calls for reform, and demands for accountability.
The board confirmed the error originated from a technical issue involving one of its two operational vehicles used to manage examinations nationwide.
The board noted that while a corrective update was pushed on Tuesday, April 29, the LAG vehicle suffered further disruption.
“In clear terms, in the process of rectifying the issue, the technical personnel deployed by the Service Provider for LAG (Lagos and South-East zones) inadvertently failed to update some of the delivery servers. Regrettably, this oversight went undetected prior to the release of the results,” the board stated.
This led to flawed exam content in specific operational zones, affecting 379,997 candidates in Lagos and South-East centres.
However, the board has announced a retake for these students beginning May 16, 2025.
What Nigerians are saying
“The Registrar of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (@JAMBHQ) Prof. Oloyede bears responsibility for the organization’s egregious errors, which have devastatingly claimed a young life, shedding crocodile tears is not a remedy for these infractions. As a first step, he should resign, followed by a thorough investigation and possible prosecution for manslaughter. Moreover, JAMB must be scrapped.”
“JAMB lost the credibility built over the years. How do we know this was the first time.”
“I need Nigerians to sit with this: JAMB toyed with the future of nearly 400,000 youths.
And we don’t even know the full scale of the damage they have done.
Young people keep paying the price for this country’s failure. It’s brutal. It hurts.”
“Nobody is going to trust JAMB results again. They’ve turned a national exam into a national joke.”
“Nigerians: what you should be demanding now is the disbandment of JAMB.
Let each accredited university or polytechnic in Nigeria have full autonomy over how they admit their students. JAMB is nothing but a time waster and if there’s such a thing; a destiny killer.
This centralised system has outlived its usefulness. Decentralising admissions will eliminate targeted or subtle discrimination and give students a fairer shot. JAMB has become just another extortion body that kills the zeal of young people to pursue education.”
“The Minister of education said the mass JAMB failure was to prove that their anti- exam malpractice systems were working
Today, JAMB registrar is crying crocodile tears about system errors after facing lawsuits from candidates.
Who do we believe? There has to be consequences”
“JAMB traumatised students by whatever glitch that was in their system. They discovered the glitch but waited 19 days before saying the truth to the public.
Now they want to re-traumatize families by making the students write the exams again in 2 days.
It makes no sense”
“I wish that lawsuit against JAMB still proceed
The trauma and distress they’ve caused these students. The life that’s been lost?
Someone needs to feel the heat. It’s beyond ‘we’re sorry, you can rewrite the exam’”
“Dear Students,
We spoke, we stood our ground and we won. JAMB has admitted their fault, and a retake has been approved.
Now, no more excuses. This is your chance to reclaim what’s yours. Focus. Prepare. Deliver. History is watching.”
