Oloyede Defends Position, Slams Critics: ‘Truck Pushers Can’t Pilot Aircraft’

Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), has denied resignation requests as a result of the scandals surrounding the administration of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Resigning would have been like to leaving the impacted students in their hour of need, Oloyede said in remarks made on Wednesday at a meeting with stakeholders, which included chief external examiners and Abuja civil society organizations.
Additionally, he brushed off calls for his resignation, implying that those who made them lacked the power or moral foundation to dispute his leadership abilities.

Pilots cannot be directed by truck pushers, he said.

The JAMB Registrar revealed that as the whole ordeal began, he thought about resigning, but he changed his mind and chose to try to make things right on the ground as much as possible.
“My first instinct was to quit when this occurred. “But people told me that the students won’t forgive you—it would look like you left them when they needed you,” Oloyede continued.

He argued that a lot of public responses were driven by false information and ignorance, and he urged the media and interested parties to refrain from politicizing educational matters.

Following the problems that surrounded this year’s UTME, various stakeholders, notably the House of Representatives’ South-East Caucus, had previously called for this stance, according to reports.

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The UTME Is Not an Intelligence Measure
UTME is merely a placement test, not an intelligence test, and should not be used to evaluate candidates, according to Professor Oloyede’s argument during the conversation.

Candidates are ranked for open spots in postsecondary schools via UTME. “It is not the ultimate indicator of a student’s future or intelligence,” Oloyede stated.

Additionally, the JAMB Registrar lamented the suicide of Opesusi Timilehin, a 19-year-old applicant, who took her own life due to her poor UTME results. In her honor, he asked the meeting to pause for a minute.

“That catastrophe broke all of us,” he said. I regret to inform you that there were also fraudulent claims; some parents called me claiming their kids had passed away in order to later request money.