There is a jam in our tertiary institutions admission. Unfortunately, the regulatory Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) which last month, raced to decongest the process, became part of the problem; creating more chaos leading to protests by students, teachers and parents. JAMB was forced to abandon its new policy.

There are 1.4 million applicants seeking admission into some 140 universities with a maximum space of 450,000, and a further 350,000 spaces in other tertiary institutions. After the JAMB entrance examinations, the University of Lagos (UNILAG) for instance, had at least 32,000 applicants who met the cut off mark required to seat for the university's Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UMTE). The problem is that the institution has only 9,000 spaces, which means over two thirds of these qualified candidates will not be admitted. Rather than allow all qualified candidates to sit for the UMTE, JAMB decided to redistribute some of them to other universities, including private ones, that did not have enough applicants. In the University of Ilorin, JAMB decided that only a fifth of the qualified candidates will be allowed to take the UTME while the others were distributed to other universities.

JAMB's motives maybe altruistic, but it did not consult the affected students, the process was not transparent, forced redistribution was not part of the admission criteria and there was no pretrial. To worsen matters, some parents showed proof that their children who scored far higher marks were excluded from sitting the UMTE in their preferred universities, while candidates with lower marks were being allowed.

It is illogical that JAMB wanted to force youths who want to attend prestigious and cheap federal universities to go to costly private universities, some of which are contraptions run by proprietors whose decisions are based on how the holy spirit moves them. There are parents who may not want their children to attend universities with religious overtones or names like Madonna, Covenant, Redeemer's, Al-Hikmah or Al-Qalam. Universities should source for students and not JAMB providing markets for them in the name of redistribution especially to private universities that may be having accreditation problems. In any case, if a student is forced to abandon a public university where the fees might not be more than N100,000 for a private one with over N1 million as fees, who pays the difference?

Tertiary education is becoming increasingly expensive and there are indigent students who may need to make some income to pay fees. If JAMB throws such a candidate from commercially viable Lagos to Ilara Mokin, it would be denying such a youth, access to education. In any case, there are varied reasons why people chose particular institutions. In my case, my hero when I was in secondary school was Professor Wole Soyinka and my ambition was to learn at his feet. So I not only decided to go to Ife (now OAU) but to the Department he was head.

I was in the first set that took JAMB. So I am a pioneer jambite. Before then, each university conducted its concessional examinations and admitted students of its choice. Under JAMB, candidates picked the university of their choice and a second choice. If he is not admitted for his choice course, he can apply for a change of course in his university of first choice or can apply to the second choice.

The law establishing JAMB gives it the responsibility for conducting matriculation examinations for admission into all tertiary institutions. Along the way, JAMB was clearly compromised as it admitted students that should not have been admitted. For the universities, it became a case of garbage in, garbage out. So they revolted and in defiance of JAMB's powers, decided to screen candidates sent by the regulatory body by conducting their own independent examinations which is the UMTE. So the UMTE is actually an indictment of JAMB, a protest against its sloppiness and a vote of no confidence in the body. In a sense therefore, the UMTE is the antithesis of JAMB, and candidates who must pay to sit both examinations, are victims of the politicisation of education.

But JAMB itself is a victim of the unitary system imposed on a country whose constitution falsely proclaims it a federation. The central government imposes on JAMB a criteria for admission based on 45 percent merit and 55 percent politics; 35 percent based on 'Catchment Area' that is for candidates from states surrounding the university of first choice, and 20 percent for candidates from states adjudged to be 'Educationally Disadvantaged'. So for instance, if two students from the same house, attending the same school, with one from Imo State, and the other from Ebonyi State take the JAMB examination into UNILAG, the Ebonyi candidate, even where he is less brilliant, has a clear advantage and far higher possibility of being admitted. The candidate from Bayelsa State has the same unfair advantage over his brother from Delta State, and a candidate from Bornu State has a greater chance of being admitted into UNILAG than her sister from Ondo State.

So apart from being chaotic, our admission system, discourages merit, promotes mediocrity, ethnicity, regionalism, and contrary to our constitution, discriminates. It also promotes fraud, as desperate candidates will claim to come from these 'disadvantaged' states. Disadvantaged after 55 years of independence and trillions of Naira in federal allocations!

Increasingly in our university admission process, merit is becoming an orphan; the other criteria such as Catchment Area, Educationally Disadvantaged, JAMB list, Council list, VC list, Senate list, Dean list, are now the determinants for admission. The skewed and non-transparent admission system teaches our youths that merit does not matter; it is not what you know, but who you know.

We need urgent remedial measures. Some of these include allowing tertiary institutions with insufficient post UMTE candidates, to reopen admission for qualified candidates and, reviewing admission criteria in favour of merit. It is also necessary to cut the huge fat of ubiquitous JAMB by stripping it of the power to conduct examinations, and making it essentially, a regulatory agency while the tertiary institutions conduct independent concessional examinations.