Scraping of Post UTME and the fate of university education in Nigeria:

This post JAMB screening was invented in the year 2005 by the vice chancellor of UNN, Rev. Professor Ositadimma Nebo. This was a measure to screen out the unserious ones from the university's environment. To me then, this was a good development. It offers a lot of benefits to the students, the University and the University community. Professor Nebo faced a lot of challenges then. To an extent the screening exam encoded Nebo JAMB, taking the name of the inventor. Nebo defended his action before the Senate house of assemblies. I applauded this academic hero. Before then, people were making it by any means in JAMB. Admission then was once you can comfortably do a correct exam runs, you have it all!!! I knew so many people that made above 280 in JAMB but couldn't even score up to 100 in the post JAMB screening. Before then it was a big challenge for the decent ones to gain admission into some universities because they won't score high yet some that paid an exam mercenary will easily land. As at then (before the era of post JAMB screening ) it was a difficult task for us to go to our school through the university of Nigeria. This happened when I was in JSS2 in Saint Teresa's College Nsukka. We couldn't go through the school because of the men of the deadly campus confrantanities. These guys were killing and disrupting academy activities. They were rubbing both within the school and outside the school. They were intimidating the serious ones on campus then.
Parents were busy lavishing money on their black sheep child(ren) because either that the person is spending their money sponsoring one campus cult or using it to settle a security case. This is a person that was sent to study.
Then parents do also spend hundreds of thousands to secure admission. In fact I can't litanise them all. They are countless anyway. After the bloody campus cult clash in 2004 that led to the death of more than 30 students and a sudden vacation of the school in February 3rd of the same year, this unfolded to the subsequent emergence of a new VC, Prof. Nebo. This era brought a little comfort to us leaving around the campus environment as this man came up with a favorable measure of forestalling this heinous situation.
This led to a great turning point in the system of learning in the school.
Anyway...... This is a brief history of PUTME in Nigeria.
The latest development yesterday was that this process has been scrapped by the ministry of education. The claim was that JAMB screening will be enough. I now ask where was JAMB screening when all these impunity were taking place?
Having experienced these things when JAMB has the final say will we be comfortable to still trust them?
Is this not a measure to favour a poor academic system of the north?
Even though the process was not really a thorough means of admitting serious ones, can JAMB screening assure us such level of credibility?
If this becomes successful, I wonder what we will be seeing these days in the academic sector.
Recommendations:
1. If JAMB wants to take over the screening, a more credible steps should be given to the CBT exams.
This year's own was just used to test run the process. This is because it was full of errors. The exercise was so poor and they should improve on it.
2. JAMB should on the other hand send various candidates to the university of their choice for screening and they now call for the results from various schools for final screening for admission.
3. I know that all these steps were to reduce financial fraud to a high extent in the university education sector but scrapping PUTME will spell doom to the nation's academic sector. Let the Federal government be at the helm of the affair, provided that the exercise was not scrapped.