Mmesoma and the Nigerian disease-By Kassim Afegbua

In the last week, the media was awash with different sides to the story of a seemingly excellent JAMB score of a young girl from Anambra state who tried to legitimize it; the Joint Administration and Matriculation Board examinations bluntly refuted her claim.

Her claimed score of 358 blazed the ceiling of scores and she was almost coasting home to victory with her apple cart, until officials of JAMB pulled her back. JAMB announced in plain terms that her claimed score was false, that the result couldn’t have come from them, and was most likely doctored. Mmesoma case was a rehash of many other corrupt practices in Nigeria; and as usual, the sentiments that erupted were race, tribe, and religion. Mmesoma may readily have come across as a victim because of her age, but being a product of a society that has gone down to such an abysmal level where inferiority is chosen over and above merit, a society that tolerates mediocrity, and one that pats people on the back for wrongdoing, the truth of this episode is not a surprise.

Nigeria and Nigerians are creations with peculiar characteristics. What is impossible in Nigeria, in the bestial, does not seem to exist. It is my hope that with our new leadership of today, our society will change for the best. This hope I place on the seriousness and successful intentions of our new leadership.
Mmesoma accepted her guilt and owned up to her fraud after having tried to pull the wool over our eyes. Reading through the commentaries and the ethnic dimensions, one could easily fathom the perennial problems plaguing us, and how Nigeria would continue to be at risk of the existential threats of the dearth of professionalism that stares us in the face if wholesale corruption in our society not halted.

Before I get into the motivation for her action, let me offer a different angle to the discourse. Why did she deny initially when she was confronted with the accusation? Who gave her those TV exposures where she tried to present herself as a brilliant A student that could easily cross the UTME threshold? Mmesoma certainly did not act alone or without external stimuli. She may have been exposed to the scam and knowledge of what some people in the JAMB offices do to render service to affluent students. She may then have put that knowledge into action. Maybe she has a relative who works in the JAMB office whom she is close to and who helps students doctor their results. Her voice might have been drowned in the cacophony of voices that rented and polluted the atmosphere, but the real racketeers must be in the JAMB office; where they devise all manner of ways and techniques to undercut the system. A lot of students from time immemorial often see JAMB organized exams as “Almighty JAMB,” because the percentages of those who pass are often not encouraging. The volume of failures on JAMB exams has also become another motivation to seek other means of crossing the benchmark in search of admissions. Students prepare very hard in trying to gain knowledge to get the required score to meet the JAMB cut-off points, but they more often than not, fall short of the requirements at the end of the day. Every year, almost two million admission-seeking students write the exams, when the number of vacancies that exist in the universities doesn’t speak to the number of those who should ordinarily qualify for the slots. Now, students are seemingly focused on just scoring high enough to gain admission in this system that seems like an auction, instead of learning the subjects and having the exams test their knowledge and place them on the basis of their knowledge level. The goal has now changed. Mmesoma might have fallen prey to the malpractices of JAMB hustlers trying to make additional income through dubious means.

We were fed with the menu of what an app can do to hurt JAMB’s self-avowed fraud-proof system. We watched someone online show how easy it is to generate scores from an application. So, Mmesoma must have understudied those “Yahoo-yahoo” smart alecs who are always a step ahead in circumventing systems. Sadly too, the spontaneous action that greeted the news especially after Innoson Company offered a scholarship to her, is suggestive of the reality of the Nigerian disease of ethnicity and tribal hatred. In the thinking of Innoson Company, Mmesoma’s name might have exposed her to stigmatisation, especially on account of our recent electoral history, where many sub-nationalities tried to create their own identities for ease of co-habitation. The 2023 electoral conduct widened the schisms of our collective sufferance. Now, we are Nigerians in so many ways and parts, depending on whose platform you are choreographing your sentiments. Those who saw a tribal dimension to the whole episode got their fingers burnt when they saw the real outcome; they then withdrew their scholarship offers. Mmesoma, we are told, actually scored 249 on the exam; so, she might still require scholarship to pull through her higher education. We cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water. She needs our sympathy and empathy to rein her into a better system. No doubt, what is bad is bad. Some JAMB officials most likely have a hand in this scandal, and the deeper we probe into this ugly incident, the better for us all at resolving and building a healthier examination system that can stand the test of time.

What Mmesoma has just done is one of the several drawbacks of a typical Nigerian society, where mediocrity has become the normative order. She might not be fully abreast of the implications of what she has done, but unfortunately even beyond her losses, the society is the ultimate loser; when we breed children or students that are not discerning and morally upright. Morals need to be emphasized again in our country in raising students. The wider implications of their unwholesome conduct must be exposed to their understanding with the aim and goal of entrenching in them the determination to uphold good behavior and thus the standards of our dear nation. Both parents and their children often maintain conspiratorial silence each time such conduct is not exposed. This must stop. Parents have been found to be just as guilty as the children. What if Mmesoma was not caught? She would have walked freely through the corridors of academics, with her shoulders raised high, to underscore her “brilliance” amongst her peers. This is what gives birth to level of mediocrity and quackery in the system; our universities annually churn out half baked graduates. This partly explains the relationship between the qualified and the qualification. It has become extremely difficult to get jobs well done these days. The craze for haste to fix and collect charges, has totally banished the interest in thoroughness and quality in handling jobs. Hire a skilled labourer to fix your P.O.P, you might end up having a prostrating and frustrating design, laughing at your folly, in the name of style. The craze for crass materialism is becoming more endemic, hence we now look to our new president to instill the necessary orientation in the system and society to change our focus. The NOA needs to be put to task.

Mmesoma’s action is a product of corruption; and as with many corruption acts, there is a giver and a taker. JAMB should be probed further to unravel the other culprits in this awful reality. This episode surely will forever hunt her, if deliberate action is not taken to heal her psychology. The kind of environment in which we live, will forever make Mmesoma an object of scorn. Those who are making the loudest noise, condemning the poor girl are those parasites eating deep into the fabric of our nationality and wellbeing as a nation. Trying to apply shortcuts to the system is very common in Nigeria. Some parents go as far as paying huge sums to JAMB officials for their children to sail through the exams. As part of healing her wounds, the girl should be brought face to face with the implications of her action, and be punished; but with correction. At 19, she must be able to understand the implications of her action. We have to see remorse, and then allow her further her academic pursuits. The real challenge now, is for us to create congruency between the growing number of school students who are seeking admission into the universities, and the real vacancies; so as not to encourage a diversion of energies in the wrong direction.
Our universities are not enough to absorb all the potential students; only a handful are absorbed in each admission cycle. Many applicants are left to roam around for at least one year before further exams are conducted. Additionally, the universities and the courses they offer have remained the same over the years. No new courses to meet up with the dynamics of globalisation; still, Law and Medicine take the highest enlistment. Whereas universities in most other climes offer as many as 600 courses, Nigerian Universities offer courses within the realm of 50 to 60 at the most; so, when millions of students are competing for only a few courses and vacancies, the tendency to try to circumvent the system is rife. I trust that our new government would take deliberate steps to widen the array of courses offered in our universities to meet up with the new paradigms in our contemporary world. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is educated, and he obviously appreciates the value of sound education. I trust that he will look into this matter with the level of seriousness it deserves. We need to devote meaningful resources and attention to promoting quality education, so that we do not unwittingly encourage the scramble for paper certification, that may not have any bearing on the one whose name the certificate carries and thus the adverse effect we already see in our society today.