What you should know about JAMB and NIN registration exercise

By the 14thday of this month, Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, confirmed the speculated extension of both the registration and examination dates of this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.

The registration exercise that was to end on May 15 was extended by two weeks. The Registrar ate his earlier word that the mock examination date would not be changed when it was shifted from the earlier scheduled May 28 to June 3. The UTME slated for between June 5 and 19 was changed to between June 19 and July 3. And what was the cause of this ruckus that gave birth to this riot of dates? It was the result of the complication that followed the inability of many candidates to register for the UTME, owing to their failure to secure their National Identity Number, NIN.

To say that the requirement that UTME applicants procure their NIN before being registered was a disaster foretold, would be an understatement. One need not be a soothsayer to know that nothing good would come out of such imposition. There was always something improper, illogical and wicked about the whole idea of compelling Nigerians to get their NIN within a mindlessly short space of time amid a raging killer pandemic.

To link that demand to the requirement for UTME registration could only have come from the mind of a practised masochist. It is simply a punitive measure that strengthens the notion that Nigeria’s policymakers deliberately set out to inflict the worst form of injury on Nigerians, especially the so-called future generations that have in return developed a dangerously cynical distrust of the country and all it stands for. A major reason for the EndSARS riot of last year, one that fuelled the rage that engulfed the country for two whole weeks, was the sense of injustice that most of the youth demographic that championed the campaign felt about their treatment by the Nigerian state.

Apart from the anger which the shifts in UTME exercise dates caused, the ill-will it generated could easily have led some Nigerians to view Oloyede as harbouring, with the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, a religious or political agenda to control the number of Southerners applying for higher education. It is no secret that more Southerners apply for UTME than Northerners. View this against the backdrop of the media trial allegation against Oloyede after the Baptist Girls Academy debacle in Lagos and you get my point. The Baptist Girls controversy happened exactly two weeks after I made the point in the column of April 14 that linking NIN to UTME registration would yield nothing good except smear Prof. Oloyede’s sterling record as JAMB Registrar.

The worrisome thing about the latest gambit to make Nigerians get their NIN is the timing of it all and the impossible deadlines. This forced Nigerians out in their millions to crowded registration centres as they struggled to ensure their phone lines, a veritable means of livelihood for many, were not barred. While this madness set our communities on edge, the makers of the mindless policy sat back in smug assurance that they were executing their patriotic duty.

I do believe in a second, even third chance for someone truly sorry about their misdeed. But what is one to make of the behaviour of Isa Pantami, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, an alleged Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram sympathiser, whose determined, jihad-like pursuit of the NIN yoke on Nigerians, portray him not as a repentant supporter of terrorism as he claims, but an enforcer of some of those deadly policies the Islamist terrorists proclaim?

Why the short deadlines? Each time a deadline ends, they shift it by a few more weeks and sit back in their wicked silence to observe the discomfiture of a beleaguered people. Now a subject of litigation, there have been no less than seven deadline shifts, all to no avail. Not satisfied with this, Pantamiin cahoots with others chose to test their policy on young Nigerians desirous of getting higher education.

By JAMB’s reckoning, no less than 600, 000 of them were yet to register for the UTME on account of their failure to obtain their NIN. Anyone who has been to any of the NIN registration points would know the pain many are going through. This has been going on until some enterprising Nigerians were able to unveil a digital trail and footprint of incendiary online footage that link Isa Pantami to Islamist terrorists which in turn connect his persona as a minister to the kind of policies he promoted as a religious ideologue, proclaiming him unfit to remain in office.

Why would politicians and other public officials enact thoughtless policies that are apparently driven by a desire to inflict as much pain as possible on ordinary Nigerians in order to make gains at their expense? How can such policy-makers demand faith in such policies or in the dream of a country from which most of the people are excluded? But this is the fate of the Nigerian youth in particular and, indeed, Nigerians as a whole. For 10 years Nigeria has grappled without success with the National Identity Number agenda.

It went about this by different means, most of which were and are schemes meant to fleece the majority of the people and leave the national treasury depleted. What have we not tried; what route has the country not taken? Is it the good, old passport route? Driver’s licence? SIM registration? Bank Verification Number? Just name it, Nigeria has tried it and nothing good seems to have come out of it, either singly or collectively.

Nigerians have had their biometric information and other data taken, perhaps, more than any other people in the world. But we know less about ourselves than we did before ever embarking on this plan to account for who and how many we are. Just a few days ago Nigerians were alarmed when a statement made by President Muhammadu Buhari, that the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, should implement the Device Management Systems, DMS, that would ensure Nigerians register their International Mobile Equipment Identity, IMEI, within three months, appeared to suggest that Nigerians have to go through another gruelling round of standing on long queues in crowded spaces for registration purposes.

Only God knows what could have come out of this had Nigerians not expressed outrage at the possibility of this. Perhaps, some criminal civil servant out to make money would have demanded that they register online or visit their network providers to do the linking that they were mercifully told could be done by the phone companies without millions of people being forced out on another fool’s errand.

Vanguard News Nigeria