By Kunle Akogun
What really do Nigerians want? Are we really serious about our oft-repeated yearning for an ideal leader comparable to those in ‘saner climes’, as professional critics often regale us with? Which particular leader can ever satisfy Nigerians: the abrasive? the candid? the sincere? the whimsical? the unabashedly corrupt? the audacious? Apparently and quite unfortunately, none of these! For, like the characters in Ebenezer Obey’s classical song, ‘The Man and the Horse’, Nigerians are difficult, if not impossible to satisfy.
In one breath, we yearn for an ideal ‘saner-clime’ type of leader who is full of integrity and with the interest of the people at heart. In another breath, we scoff at any leader whose disposition is closer to that ideal construct of leadership trait just because he does not belong to our clan or creed. This scenario would appear to have played out last week when a Nigerian public official did the unthinkable by owning up to a fault he did not commit directly and sought forgiveness of Nigerians, especially those directly affected. That was the Oloyede story.
In a rare display of sincere leadership and genuine compassion for the welfare of the people he serves, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Emeritus Prof. Is’haq Olanrewaju Oloyede, CON, last Wednesday (May 14, 2025) publicly apologised for the glitches that marred the just concluded Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Not only did he take full responsibility for the computer errors that led to failures in the examination in Lagos and some South Eastern states, he also offered a second chance to the affected candidates, about 379,997 of them, to retake the examination.
Whereas a typical Nigerian leader would blame everybody else but himself for any anomaly, Emeritus Prof. Oloyede, knowing full well that as a servant leader, the buck stops on his table, took responsibility for everything that went wrong. He said, “As Registrar of JAMB, I hold myself personally responsible, including for the negligence of the Service Provider, and I unreservedly apologise for it and the trauma that it has subjected affected Nigerians to, directly and indirectly.” He wouldn’t even blame the contractor (Service Provider) who had pocketed huge sums of money for the critical job he was supposed to have provided seamlessly!
This is quite unusual, but very laudable, especially in a country where leaders are fond of giving excuses to rationalise their failure to deliver on assigned mandates. Indeed, like the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Prof. Wahab Olasupo Egbewole, SAN, said while reacting to the unusual openness displayed by Prof. Oloyede in the handling of the matter, “only a conscientious, sincere, and courageous leader with genuine compassion for the welfare of the people he serves could openly accept responsibility for an incident surrounding the service delivery of an organisation he heads but which glitch was not due to his personal negligence.”
Expectedly, this unprecedented sincerity, by Nigerian leadership standard, was massively commended all over the country by prominent individuals, national and international organisations, as a rarity in Nigeria’s socio-political milieu.
This is not surprising, anyway, as the iconic Emeritus Professor has always proven to be a rare breed Nigerian. As I wrote in the introduction to my humble contribution to a Festschrift in honour of Prof. Oloyede on his retirement from the University of Ilorin in 2024, “he is a public official who is apparently immune to the general malaise bedevilling the nation’s socio-economic milieu. His entire public service record radiates transparency, accountability, single-minded commitment to service excellence, administrative acumen, dogged commitment to the achievement of set goals, undiluted integrity in public service, effortless exhibition of leadership by example and unapologetic insistence on fairness to all!”
I added in that piece, titled ‘OLOYEDE: Portrait of a Rare Breed Public Servant’, “This audacious public servant became a household name nationwide during his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, having largely succeeded in turning the second generation University to a world class institution. This, he achieved by dint of hard work, resilience, consistency, tenacity of purpose, innovative ideas, and unparalleled team spirit.
“As Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Oloyede left no stone unturned in his relentless pursuit of academic excellence through which he ensured that admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria is transparent and credible. Apart from ensuring and sustaining the unassailable integrity of the tertiary institutions’ admission process, another remarkable feat of JAMB under Professor Oloyede’s watch is the yearly remittance of huge funds, running into billions of naira, to the Federal Government’s coffers. This is quite unprecedented by any non-revenue yielding MDA in the country. The money, according to the Board’s spokesman, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, was saved through the transparent and judicious use of resources. This is indeed praise-worthy, especially in a country where even some MDAs that were specifically and statutorily established to collect revenue for the government often go back to the government to ask for extra-budgetary bail-outs to augment their overhead costs. Those who do not receive such bail-outs often remit pittance to the national treasury at the end of the financial year.”
However, even though Prof. Oloyede’s genuine acceptance of blame and sincere apology in the UTME saga drew massive applause from well-meaning Nigerians and non-Nigerians, the reactions of some professional critics and a coterie of unapologetic habitual haters of this new breed Nigerian public official have left a lot to be desired. One of these reactions was the rejection of JAMB’s decision to conduct a fresh examination for candidates affected by the system error by a group that went ahead to make a laughable demand that rather than scheduling a ‘re-sit’ of the UTME, JAMB should just “award 300 marks to all affected candidates from the South East”! What a demand! Why must we politicise everything in this country, including subjecting the future of our innocent children to the needless game of political mischief? The story of Miss Joy Mmesoma Ejikeme, who claimed to have been the highest scorer in the 2023 UTME, is still fresh in our memories. It was later discovered that the innocent damsel was being used as a pawn in a wicked political chessboard.
Another weird reaction to JAMB’s public apology was the unconscionable call for the resignation of Prof. Oloyede and outright scrapping of JAMB. In all honesty, these two demands are a disservice to this nation at a time when the JAMB Registrar has become the poster boy of service excellence and when JAMB itself has become a reference point for public service integrity.
To me, and I think to many Nigerians, if we are truly serious about making the country work, we should actively encourage people like Prof. Oloyede, and they are very rare to come by in this clime, to take up higher national responsibilities. There are so many areas of the nation’s socio-economic sector that need the type of the well-known Oloyede-Midas touch. Rather than vilifying him for technology glitch resulting from the negligence of a careless Service Provider, Oloyede’s service could be sought to sanities some crucial national agencies that are very critical to the socio-economic development of Nigeria and the general well-being of its citizens.
Akogun is the Director, Corporate Affairs, University of Ilorin