A crown of nails

For 19-year-old Mmesoma Ejikeme, the claim to being the top scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has turned out to be a crown of nails. She has been exposed by the examination body as a fraudster, or at the least duped by a syndicate of fraudsters. But even if duped, the board says, it has been with her complicity. Mmesona claimed she scored 362 marks in the examination whereas JAMB said its own record showed she scored 249 marks. Following the controversy, the board withdrew her score and slammed her with a three-year ban. But she mounted a daring front to impugn the board’s credibility. She postured like the biblical puny David taking on the huge Goliath. Only unlike David, she didn’t off with Goliath’s head.

The examination body brought the controversy into the open early last week by accusing Mmesoma of manually inflating her scores to hoodwink the public into showering her with undeserved rewards, which included a three million naira scholarship from Innoson Motors Founder Innocent Chukwuma. JAMB spokesperson Fabian Benjamin said in a statement that the board was constrained to set the records straight following enquiries made by an official of the Anambra State Government that was also planning to honour the young lady. She had manipulated her UTME result to deceive the public into fraudulently obtaining the Innoson scholarship and other recognition, the spokesman said. JAMB threatened to withdraw her score and ban her, and it made good on those threats after undertaking an administrative inquiry. “The truth is that JAMB has concluded the investigation on Mmesoma’s score falsification matter. She was not the only one caught, just that others have chosen not to go out. At present, there is an industry faking results and, unfortunately, they cannot penetrate JAMB system, reason being that (our) system is fool-proofed,” JAMB Registrar Professor Ishaq Oloyede said.

Not that the examination board picked arbitrarily on Mmesoma, and there is no conceivable reason why it should anyway. Its statement cited another case of one Atung Gerald in Kaduna who claimed to have scored 380 marks and his kinsfolk had demanded he be accorded special recognition, only for the board to unearth the fact that Atung did not obtain the 2023 UTME application forms, much less sitting the examination.  But Mmesoma’s case got traction apparently because she stood up to the board and managed to garner some measure of public sympathy as is typically reserved for the underdog in a duel with a bully. She took high visibility pitches on conventional and online media to ply her own counter-narrative. She also dredged up primordial passions in the polity, with notable interventions insinuating motivations such as ethnicity and other base biases on the part of the examination body. It wasn’t just JAMB on trial, however, but the survival of the Nigerian education system – the examination body being the official bridge, at least up until now, between the secondary and tertiary levels.

Tracking the path of the young lady in infamy illuminates the controversy. Mmesoma of Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS), Nnewi,  had generated a result indicating her total score as 362 and had laid claim to being the top scorer when JAMB named 16-year-old Umeh Nkechinyere, incidentally also an Anambrarian like Mmesoma but who attended Deeper Life High School, Lagos, as the authentic top scorer with 360 marks. AGSS Principal Mrs. Uchekwukwu Edum was reported saying Mmesoma had tendered her purported result to the school and was already being celebrated when news broke that someone else scored highest. “Our school is a mission school, so we decided there was need to reach out to the commissioner (i.e., Anambra State Commissioner for Education, Professor Ngozi Chuma-Udeh) on this. So, the commissioner called JAMB and they said there was no such thing,” she explained. In its own narrative, the Anambra government said Mmesoma went to the office of the education commissioner with her UTME result to protest that JAMB didn’t recognise her as the candidate with the highest score. “The commissioner in turn called JAMB to confirm her claim, but she was told that Mmesoma’s result was forged. It was at this point that JAMB authorities invited the Directorate of State Services (DSS) to investigate the matter and make its findings known,” a statement by Commissioner for Information Paul Nwosu said. 

“Mmesoma: North, South, East or West, dishonesty never pays.”

Meanwhile, there has been a rash of probes instituted besides the one by the security agencies. The Anambra government had hinted at a grouse with the examination body. “This (i.e. the DSS investigation) was yet to happen when JAMB went public with the matter, thus eliciting the raucous conversations we’ve seen in the media. It is not our wish to join the slanging match or take sides at this stage. But as a responsible government, we have decided to undertake an independent investigation into the matter,” it said in its statement as it announced an eight-member panel – with six of them being professors – constituted by Governor Chukwuma Soludo. Innoson Motors said it was conducting its own independent investigation to “unravel the truth” and would go ahead with the scholarship for Mmesoma if she’s vindicated. Former Education Minister Obi Ezekwesili called for an independent technical investigation. At the national level, the House of Representatives accused JAMB of being the accuser and the judge by withdrawing Mmesoma’s score and banning her even before third-party investigation was concluded. The green chamber raised its own ad hoc panel and asked the examination body to stay action until it concludes the probe. By last weekend, however, the Anambra government’s panel outed with its finding that the 19-year-old did falsify her result.

The many parallel probes illustrated the endemic distrust by Nigerians in public institutions, and in this particular case the matriculation board. But matters were fairly obvious there was result forgery involved in Mmesoma’s case. JAMB made known that the result slip showing 360 marks which the young lady paraded was a falsified a copy of the result slip of another candidate named Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle, who sat for UTME in 2021 and scored 138 marks. Mmesoma impliedly admitted that connection when she said the QR code upon being scanned showed Omobolanle’s data, but she argued it was the examination board up to some chicanery. Besides, whereas the young lady claimed that the results notification slip showing 362 marks as her score was printed from the JAMB results portal, the board said the template had been discarded since 2021. The clincher was: amidst conflicting claims on the nature of exchanges between Mmesoma and the board, she acknowledged that she received a notification indicating her score to be 249.

And it wasn’t only JAMB’s word to be taken on the discrepancy in the lady’s result slip. Former Aviation Minister Osita Chidoka whose foundation owns the Computer Based Test (CBT) centre where Mmesoma sat her UTME pinpointed two red flags on the slip namely: (i) the centre’s name as indicated on the paraded slip was last used in 2021 before it was changed at JAMB’s insistence to reflect the name on its Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) registration, and (ii) the result format was also last used in 2021, as “those who took the last examination at our centre showed a different result slip template with the candidate’s passport picture, JAMB watermarks, and no mention of the name of the examination centre.” Chidoka added: “I gave young Mmesoma the benefit of the doubt and waited to see if she would explain how she got the result, which is obviously not the approved JAMB result template used in 2023. Without that explanation, I knew it was a fake result.”

There should be no question that Mmesoma paraded a forged result. What is left is to ascertain the extent of her complicity, and identify lessons to be learnt from the entire saga. She is one lass with a load of promise, and sanctions to be applied should be redemptive and take account of her future prospects. But she must come clean and expose the forgery syndicate, towards cleansing the Augean stable of results racketeering. And by the way, what has taken the DSS so long in ascertaining the facts of the case? Shame to all who egged the girl on, like the father Romanus Ejikeme who should have conducted parental audit rather than cheerlead his daughter in a criminal act, and others who plied the underdog sentiment at the cost of opening up old faultlines. North, South, East or West, dishonesty never pays.