By Clement Idoko,
The Registrar of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Is-haq Oloyede has emerged as the best advocate of equal opportunity in higher education in Africa.
He was rated high above others in Africa at a meeting recently held at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, where African countries were compared in the opportunities afforded to people living with disabilities and their access to higher education in Nigeria.
A total of 383 blind candidates and other forms of disabilities sat for the ongoing 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in eleven centres spread across Nigeria from May 12th and 13th. The conduct of the 2022 UTME, which commenced on 6th May would end on Monday, 16th May 2022.
Chairman of the JAMB Equal Opportunity Group (JEOG), Prof Emeritus Peter Okebukola, made this known in a statement he personally signed and made available to newsmen in Abuja.
Okebukola, a former executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) who recently returned from UNESCO headquarters in Paris, said he was excited by the rating which was adjudged by the presentation made by JEOG at the meeting.
The Group which was set up by Professor Is-haq Oloyede, in 2017, has been able to process over 2000 candidates with disabilities especially the blind, albinos with sight challenges, and candidates with autism and Down syndrome through the administration of the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The Group is made up of 43 senior academics including former executive secretaries of parastatals of the Federal Ministry of Education, former Vice-Chancellors, a former minister and experts in special education and other relevant stakeholders such as the President of the Nigeria Association of the Blind, National President, Joint National Association of Persons with Disabilities, President, The Albino Foundation and President, Nigeria National Association of Deaf. The Anglo-Nigeria Welfare Association for the Blind plays an active role in the exercise.
Okebukola stressed that the blind candidates and others that are served by the group take the same test items as those who are not blind, explaining that the mode of examination administration is blended- use of PCs and use of the traditional Braille slate and stylus/typewriters in writing answers to questions that are read out by a subject expert.
He added that this was in alignment with the current state of development of Nigeria’s higher education system with regard to the education of the blind.
He said: “JEOG is already implementing a strategic plan of gradually increasing the ICT component of the administration of the UTME to match the improvement in ICT usage for the education of the blind in the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
“JAMB takes full responsibility for hotel accommodation and feeding of the candidates in the 11 centres and pays generous transport supplementation while providing them with a conducive environment to write the examination.
“Additionally, each blind candidate received the very precious tools of slate and stylus from JAMB that will be used during the course of study, when admitted in a tertiary institution,” Okebukola said.
According to the statistics from JAMB, in 2019, of the 390 candidates, a total of 175 (44.8%) were given admission, which he said was unprecedented in the history of admission of such category of students into the Nigerian higher education system.
“In 2020, 89 of the 351 blind candidates (25%) that sat for the UTME, were given admission. In 2021, a total of 110 blind candidates were given admission, out of the 332 that sat for the UTME. This 33 per cent admission of blind candidates to higher education in an annual cohort is unprecedented in the African higher education system,” he said.
