Professor Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB and Executive Arrogance in Nigeria

Professor Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB and Executive Arrogance in Nigeria | Copyright © 2020 By Dr. Chukwuma A. J. Chinwo

Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) Citation: Chukwuma AJ Chinwo, ‘Professor Is-haq Oloyede, JAMB and Executive Arrogance in Nigeria’ (2020) Nigerian Legal Research Articles <https://nigerianlawyersdirectory.com/research/professor-is-haq-oloyede-jamb-and-executive-arrogance-in-nigeria> (date of access)

Democracy is about the focus on the people to seek and know their opinions, pursue their welfare and secure their existence by persons chosen by and subject to them. It means that it is the way of life and operation by all those who hold the reins of power and administration.

While we bemoan the democracy-deficiency of our State political leaders in the three tiers of the nation, it is time that Nigerians should focus on those lower down — administrators of statutory bodies, including universities and even at our non-governmental and community levels.

Very often it is forgotten that the experience of Nigerians with these institutions shape their behaviours when they have opportunity to be in political offices. I am very much persuaded that what we see of our political actors, and of course the agberoes at the motor parks, are often the products of what they saw in their teachers, school administrators, community leaders, executives of non-governmental organisations, including religious places. They carry on with such pictures thinking that is how and what leadership ought to be.

A teacher who comes late to the class and expects that the students should thank him for coming at all would produce the Judge who comes late to the court and expects all the lawyers and members of the public to gleefully bow and say ‘as the court pleases’. The teacher who would not tolerate his students asking him questions, not to talk of disagreeing with him, produces the Governor, Local Government Chairman, teacher, and so forth who thinks that dissent is abomination even when it is for his good.

One administrator who had made this giving of wrong idea of administration a trade mark and has become utterly self-conceited and disdainful about it is Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). Persons like him destroy institutions and sometimes the larger society in the long term in their zealotry to achieve temporary success. They never listen to anyone. They know it all and they alone are right. They claim to be the only lover of the institution they lead, even if such institutions have been in existence before they were born. Every other voice is considered to be a rebel and, if they can, they crush them. They encourage sycophancy, the college of those who dance round their seats shouting ‘regis non potest delicto’ (the king can do no wrong). When they introduce weird and destructive policies, they disdain all other voices and brand them evil. When the policies fail, they never apologise but seek for others whom they would take as scapegoats.

While Professor Oloyede was Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin he had his ‘patron saint’ in the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Both of them operated on ‘all or nothing’, ‘me or no other’, ‘my idea and no other ideas’ slates. They got on well. Of all the academics in the University only Oloyede was patriotic; of all the universities in Nigeria only his own was patriotic. He dealt with his colleagues in the University the way no other head of academic institution had done or should ever do. He would dismiss in one fell swoop over 40 academics, including Professors who had been in the rank long before him. He reported that he was able to run the University without those staff, as if he did not know that running a university is not elementary school where one teacher can teach all the subjects the pupils would learn in the session. University education is the stage of specific and specialised learning and instruction. He gave the President the impression that lecturers could be dismissed as a householder can dismiss his domestic staff. University of Ilorin, because of Oloyede and his successor who tried to follow his step, became the University that has paid more remuneration to staff for work not done than any other in Nigeria, if not anywhere in the world!

Unfortunately, such persons leave office and leave heavy legal and financial liabilities for the institutions they claimed to love more than any other. Nigeria is suffering heavily from the work of highhanded administrators who claim to know it all, but destroy the institutions. Justice Olatawura, then of the Supreme Court, in Foreign Finance Corporation v. Lagos State Development and Property Corporation once (in 1991) bemoaned this kind of officials and suggested a remedy:

‘Those who think that might is right and that government can do no wrong should better have a second thought. We have long passed that stage. Public servants who behave as if they are above the law believing that their actions will be approved by the government are not better than those who deliberately set out in a collision course with the law. . . . The time has come that a copy of judgment wherein erring officials who set out to serve their personal interests should now be sent to government so that those who mislead the government should be surcharged for damages incurred by the government as a result of their ill-advised actions. The laws, rules and regulations for public service are designed to guide them in their discharge of public duties. No laws place them above the laws of the land.’

I agree and add that even when they had left office, the government should trace them and recover such damages from them or their estates. What administrators like Oloyede do is often replicated by political leaders who feel that they cannot be challenged and ride roughshod over citizens. They leave behind the work of healing and reparation for their successors.

Since Oloyede was appointed as the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of JAMB he has, in his apparent self-conceit, transferred his ways to the Board. It is the same ‘take it or leave it’ attitude. He devises policies which he forces down the throat of Nigerians. There is no doubt that some of them are good, but just like such persons do, some goods are mixed in acidic media.

The latest action of Professor Oloyede in posting Nigerian students and aspirants to universities who registered for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) to far-flung places without their consent is a back breaker. Never in the history of the nation, as retrogressive as we tend, has any statutory body taken as retrogressive and arbitrary a decision as this one. Students—a greater number of them teenagers—bought forms, chose cities where they wished to write examinations, based no doubt on conditions of proximity and convenience; but when they were posted to write the examinations some had been sent to towns and villages hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of kilometres away from their place of domicile.

Many thought it was an error, as Oloyede explained it in past years. This time he came out blazing and blaring: It was to stop examination malpractice! This is the man who, as Vice Chancellor of University of Ilorin, claimed that examination malpractice was exterminated under his watch. He had claimed in the past two examinations that he had devised malpractice-proof methods in JAMB. He had kept tinkering with the system of admission and examination procedures he met, often not listening to the universities he is supposed to be working for and in collaboration with.

How any person would think that the way to avert examination malpractice is to send little children under very hassling conditions to cities, towns, and villages they have not known before—in the present-day Nigeria—must be one of the most bizarre expectations that can be. In times gone by some parents were accused of being around examination centres to influence things in favour of their children and wards.

What Oloyede has done now is to make it mandatory for parents to travel with their children, suffer with them and see what they can do to ‘reign’ with them. Not many parents who manage to get their children into strange land to write examination would be ready to stop at anything suggested to them as a means not to pass through the route a second time. Did the Professor consider the security implication? Did he consider the suffering candidates would pass through to identify their examination centres? Did he appreciate that the distress the candidates may pass through can unsettle the average student especially in the computer-based text system (CBT) which he is touting as the be-all-end-all, yet showing that it is a woeful failure?

What of the issues of legality? How can it be explained that a candidate who bought a form for an examination, was asked to indicate which examination city or town he would wish to write the examination in, chose a city or town and paid for the examination, is arbitrarily thrown to a city or town not only out of the local government, but out of the State of his domicile? Lawyers have to put on their thinking cap. Is that not a breach of contract? Without being given opportunity to be heard as to the feasibility of writing examination in such strange land before being thrown there willy-nilly, is not a breach of a candidate’s right to fair hearing in the determination of his right and obligation? Some candidates may be exposed to indignities and horrible exposure for the purpose of writing the examinations. Is that not a breach of their right to dignity of their persons and to privacy of their persons? If a candidate is exposed to trespass to his or her person in one form or the other, would it be too remote to pin it on Professor Oloyede? It goes on.

Yet Oloyede is supposed to be working under the supervision of a Minister and President! There are supposed to be representatives in the legislative Assemblies representing these hapless children. Cry, my beloved country!

Copyright © 2020 By Dr. Chukwuma A. J. Chinwo

Dr. Chukwuma A. J. Chinwo, the author of this article, is a Barrister & Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, a senior member of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), a university lecturer with special research interest in constitutional and administrative law, and an accomplished author.