New JAMB Registrar Declares War on Exam Fraud
Nigeria’s tertiary admissions system changed hands on Friday as Prof. Segun Aina formally took over as Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, promising an uncompromising campaign against examination fraud in an institution that processes the ambitions of more than two million young Nigerians every year.
At the handover ceremony at the JAMB National Headquarters in Bwari, Abuja, Aina told fraud syndicates, impersonators, certificate forgers and compromised examination centres that their “business is in the wrong institution,” pledging to deploy every lawful technological, administrative and investigative tool to detect and prosecute offenders. “We shall protect the integrity of JAMB with everything the law permits,” he said, describing every fraudulent admission as “a place stolen from an honest Nigerian.”
His words land against a backdrop of hard numbers. JAMB says 2,243,816 candidates registered for the 2026 UTME, a 10.5 percent rise from the 2.03 million recorded in 2025, with Lagos alone accounting for 381,814 registrations. Yet performance remains stubbornly weak. Roughly three out of every four candidates scored below 200 out of a possible 400, while fewer than one percent crossed the 300 mark widely regarded as competitive for medicine, law and engineering.
The integrity question is equally pressing. During the 2025 cycle, JAMB withheld 39,834 results over suspected infractions, including 3,656 candidates flagged for “extraneous fingerprints,” 2,157 for fingerprint rejection linked to registration fraud, and 244 caught subscribing to “WhatsApp runs” that promised leaked questions. Four computer based test centres were delisted, 80 suspects were handed to the police, and a special review later traced technology driven malpractice involving biometric manipulation and image morphing, leading to the cancellation of more than 6,300 results.
The new registrar inherits both the reforms and the scars of his predecessor. Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, who ran the board for nearly a decade, is credited with restoring public confidence and remitting billions of naira in surpluses to the treasury. His tenure, however, closed under the shadow of the 2025 technical failure that compromised the results of 379,997 candidates across 157 centres in Lagos and the five South East states, forcing a mass resit and an emotional public apology in which he accepted personal responsibility. The episode drew calls for his resignation and remains a reference point for critics of the computer based system.
Aina arrives with a profile built for the moment. Appointed by President Bola Tinubu on May 21, 2026, the 39 year old Professor of Computer Engineering at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, becomes the youngest registrar in JAMB’s history and its sixth substantive head. He holds a doctorate in Digital Signal Processing from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom and has spent more than 15 years advising government on digital systems, a background his backers say suits a board whose credibility now rests largely on technology.
He signalled that his answer to fraud would be systems rather than personalities. “If, at the end of my stewardship, JAMB becomes less dependent on individuals and more dependent on strong systems, less vulnerable to personalities and more resilient because of its culture, then I shall consider my service worthwhile,” he said. He also promised a friendlier, less stressful experience, insisting the board “must never become the source of unnecessary trauma for Nigerians.”
Recalling that he served at JAMB as a youth corps member nearly 20 years ago, Aina described his return as “a homecoming” and appealed to young Nigerians to reject shortcuts. “Never allow anyone to convince you that integrity no longer matters,” he said. “Nigeria needs your intelligence, but it needs your integrity even more.”