The Pro-chancellor/Chairman, University of Calabar Governing Council, Cross River State, Senator Nkechi Nwaogu, has called for scrapping of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination.
Nwaogu, in an interview in Aba, the commercial nerve of Abia State, said the examination body had outlived its usefulness.
“One of the things I would like the Federal Government to do with regard to education is to scrap JAMB. It doesn’t make sense that children sit for UTME and are also subjected to individual universities’ aptitude tests. We should go back to what it used to be many years ago: you select your university and you sit for their exams. I think that the process of going through JAMB is unnecessarily rigorous and wasteful. They cannot be making money at the detriment of education itself. For me, JAMB has outlived its usefulness.
“We know that so many people who sit for UTME are not given admission in almost all the universities, unless they go to private universities which may be beyond their financial reach.”
Nwaogu, a former Senate Committee on Banking and Oil and Gas chairman, called for a reduction of wastage in the sector.
He called on Federal and state institutions of higher learning to initiate ideas that would make them self-reliant instead of depending on the government funding.
“Universities can be made to be self-funding if the Federal Government sits up because they have a lot in the universities that can be turned into use for running universities rather than them being siphoned. If universities are 75 percent self-funded, it will give the Federal Government the opportunity to fund more universities today.
“Federal universities should sit up to improve on their income generation to provide quality administration and management in the universities.
She also called for curriculum review.
“I think that university teaching structure should be reviewed. University curricula should be reviewed because a lot of courses are moribund in Nigeria.
“We should review our curricula to meet with the advancement in the world. I think that we should also look at the remuneration for the lecturers and all that are involved in the university community,” she said.
