FACT-CHECK: Did JAMB Target UTME Candidates in Southeast for Failure?

Following the stunning admission by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that there were errors in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results, speculations have been rife on social media that the board targeted candidates in the Southeast for failure.

Speaking on Wednesday, JAMB Registrar, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, publicly apologised for the errors that led to the failure of nearly 400,000 candidates and blamed the issue on technical glitches.

EDITOR’S PICKS

• HORROR TREND: How Container Falls Killed 22 Lagos Residents, Injured 17 in Five Years

• Ganduje Says Nothing Wrong with a One-Party State — What Do Political Commentators Think?

• Rivers Emergency Rule: Inside Tinubu’s Suit to Shut Down PDP Governors

According to Oloyede, the board discovered discrepancies linked to faulty server updates in its Lagos and Owerri zones, which led to the failure to upload candidates’ responses during the first three days of the examination.

JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, said candidates in Lagos and Owerri zone were affected by the technical glitches that forced the failure of nearly 400,000 candidates in the southwest and southeast

Oloyede said the problem, which was caused by one of the two technical service providers for the exercise, went undetected before the results were released.

The Claims About Targeted Failures

Some organisations and individuals on social media have seized on the JAMB Registrar’s admission that 173,387 candidates were affected by the technical glitches in the Owerri Zone, a southeastern part of the country.

They claim that the more than 170,000 candidates were intentionally failed by JAMB because of their region.

One of such organisations is the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Nigeria Nsukka branch, which threatened to sue JAMB over the UTME rssults.

The Chairman of ASUU-UNN, Óyibo Eze, who claimed that the union targeted candidates from the Southeast region, spoke during an interview with journalists in Nsukka on Wednesday.

Eze further claimed that the massive failure in the region was a deliberate attempt by JAMB to stop children from the zone from getting admission.

Likewise, a prominent social commentator, Dr Aloy Chife, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to claim that the errors in the UTME results disproportionately affected Igbos, who are predominantly from the Southeast, suggesting that the incident was a case of discrimination.

“A true calamity! The Igbos are the top JAMB exam performers. And this calamity disproportionately befell them. What does this portend? An unhappy coincidence or malice. Context matters. Nigeria has a history of discrimination against Igbos. Quota system, brutal repression etc,” Chife wrote.

An X user, Monsieur Avril, also suggested that the board failed candidates from the Southeast to discredit Peter Obi, a former Governor of Anambra State.

“Called it last year, & they just tested it with JAMB,” Avril posted, attaching a post in which he accused the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) of playing politics by allegedly removing a 2016 video that apparently showed Obi discussing the steps his government took to make Anambra the top state in WAEC and NECO examinations.

Another user, Theo Aguda, suggested that JAMB failed an entire region, speculating that there might have been intentional sabotage of candidates from the region in past UTME editions.

“JAMB failing an entire region and calling it ‘A system glitch’ is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. Ichabod. No way this has not been happening,” Aguda wrote.

Also, Emmanuel Echeta claimed that only southeastern states were affected by the technical glitches that JAMB blamed for the failure of over 379,000 candidates.

“Of all regions, it’s the South Eastern states which have led in these national examinations that had this ‘technical glitch’ with JAMB. I’ll never deny the agenda. It’s been there since the 60s. What I detest is the lack of effort to hide it,” Echeta wrote on X.

Another X user, with the username Uncle Chibuzo, claimed that JAMB failed UTME candidates in the Southeast to hurt Obi, an influential political figure in the region who ran against President Bola Tinubu in the 2023 election.

“The handwriting was on the wall when JAMB left exam they were organising to fact-check Peter Obi. I just knew every candidate in the S/East was at risk, especially Anambra,” the user wrote.

The Facts

On Wednesday, the JAMB Registrar disclosed that 65 centres in Lagos (206,610 candidates) and 92 centres in the Owerri Zone (173,387 candidates) were affected, bringing the total number of impacted candidates to 379,997.

Although more centres were affected in the Owerri Zone, which is in the Southeast, more candidates were affected in Lagos (206,610), in the southwestern region of the country.

FURTHER READING

• ANALYSIS: How 2025 UTME Results Compare to the Last Ten Years

• What Nigeria Being Capital of Malnourished Children in Africa Means for Future

• INSIGHT: Should You Eat More Salt as Pastor Oyakhilome Advised?

This disclosure counters claims that candidates in the Southeast were the only victims of the errors. In fact, candidates in Lagos State were mistakenly failed as well.

James Nnanyelugo, the Chief Operating Officer of Educare, a software for educational institutions, who participated in the 2025 UTME review, said JAMB made significant changes to its system for this year’s examination, which triggered irregularities.

Nnanyelugo said, while these improvements were technologically sound in theory, a major operational flaw was uncovered during the implementation phase.

“The system patch necessary to support both shuffling and source-based validation had been fully deployed on the server cluster supporting the KAD (Kaduna) zone, but it was not applied to the LAG (Lagos) cluster, which services centres in Lagos and the South-East. This omission persisted across all sessions until the 17th session, after which the error was discovered and corrected,” he stated.

“As a result, approximately 92 centres in the South-East and 65 centres in Lagos—totalling 157 centres—operated using outdated server logic that could not appropriately handle the new answer submission/marking structure. This affected an estimated 379,997 candidates, whose results were severely impacted due to system mismatches during answer validation.”

This review, which involved the participation of independent observers like Educare, concluded that there were legitimate technical glitches that were not the result of manipulation and sabotage against a specific group of candidates.

The system patch, which was fully deployed to the Kaduna cluster and not to the Lagos cluster, explains why centres in Lagos and Owerri zone were disproportionately affected by the systemic failures, but does not give any credence to claims of targeted failure.

Claim: JAMB intentionally failed UTME candidates in the Southeast.

Verdict: There is no available evidence to support this claim after independent review. Over 200,000 candidates in Lagos, in the Southwest, were also affected by technical glitches that resulted in the failure of nearly 400,000 candidates. Therefore, this claim is FALSE and MISLEADING.

Watch Our Video Of The Week:

---

Advertise or Publish a Story on EkoHot Blog:

Kindly contact us at [email protected]. Breaking stories should be sent to the above email and substantiated with pictorial evidence.

Citizen journalists will receive a token as data incentive.

Call or Whatsapp: 0803 561 7233, 0703 414 5611