Benjamin Kalu opens fire on what he brands “systemic negligence,” insisting that the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board must “stop hiding behind acronyms and start fixing hardware.” He maintains that the 2025 UTME meltdown, which stranded 380,000 candidates, is not a mere glitch but a predictable failure born of outdated servers and complacent oversight.
He contends that a truly independent audit—run by external cybersecurity and EdTech engineers, not JAMB insiders— is the only path to restoring credibility. According to the Deputy Speaker, such an audit should catalogue server uptimes, bandwidth bottlenecks, biometric mis-reads, and CCTV blackouts, then publish the raw data for public scrutiny and legislative debate.
Demand for Real-Time Monitoring Sparks Rift with Education Ministry
Benjamin Kalu accuses the Federal Ministry of Education of treating real-time monitoring tools as “luxury add-ons” instead of essential safeguards. He claims that dashboards flagging latency spikes could have rerouted affected candidates within minutes, averting the South-East and Lagos fiasco entirely.
Ministry officials, speaking off-record, counter that JAMB already runs “tier-one” surveillance. Benjamin Kalu retorts that those dashboards are “pretty wallpapers with zero redundancy,” stressing that the National Assembly will legislate compulsory live-feed integration across all CBT centres—backed by fines for every minute of down-time.
South-East Candidates Bear the Brunt—Data Shows Unequal Impact
Brandishing internal memos, Benjamin Kalu highlights that 62 percent of failed biometric authentications occurred in the five South-East states, with Lagos recording the next highest cluster. He calls the skew “digital disenfranchisement,” arguing that it undercuts regional equity promised in the 1999 Constitution.
Civil-society groups now threaten class-action litigation on behalf of candidates whose scores were voided. They insist JAMB waive change-of-institution fees, reschedule free retakes, and compensate families who travelled long distances only to meet “screens of death.”
Lawmakers Mull Subpoenas, Tech CEOs Placed on Notice
Benjamin Kalu confirms that the House Committee on Education will subpoena JAMB’s chief technology officer, contracted cloud vendors, and biometric device suppliers. “If you sold us vaporware, be ready to refund the Treasury,” he warns, hinting at criminal referrals for procurement fraud.
Industry insiders fear a cascading effect: potential blacklisting from future federal contracts and mandatory open-source code reviews. Venture-capital-backed CBT startups worry that intrusive probes could chill investment, yet Kalu insists transparency is “non-negotiable in a data-driven era.”
Opposition Cries “Political Theatre,” Yet Parents Rally Behind Audit
Opposition MPs dismiss the audit push as grandstanding aimed at 2027 electoral optics. They note that glitches have haunted UTME since 2013, arguing that Kalu’s outrage is “selective amnesia.”
Nonetheless, parent-teacher associations across Enugu, Abia, and Lagos Island have filed joint petitions supporting his motion. Viral videos of students weeping outside locked centres dominate social media, shifting public sentiment toward sweeping reforms rather than partisan point-scoring.
Roadmap: From Firefighting to Future-Proofing National Exams
Benjamin Kalu outlines a six-point legislative roadmap: mandatory penetration testing six months before every UTME, a national CBT uptime index, a sovereign cloud hosted in Nigeria, escrowed source code, biometric fallback protocols, and an annual public-facing “Examination Resilience Report.”
He promises quarterly oversight hearings until these pillars go live, warning that “the era of trial-and-error examinations is over.” With bandwidth throttling, cyber-intrusions, and power instability now matters of national security, Kalu concludes that safeguarding UTME integrity is “as patriotic as defending our borders.”
Table of Contents
Discover more from OGM News NG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
