***Demands Educational Overhaul
The dismal performance in the 2024 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) has drawn sharp criticism from former presidential candidate Peter Obi, who has described the outcome as a national emergency requiring urgent intervention.
Reacting to the result breakdown released by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Obi warned that the mass failure reflects the systemic collapse of Nigeria’s education sector. Of the 1.9 million candidates who took the exam, only about 420,000 scored above 200 — a staggering 78% scored below average.
“This is not just about bad results; it’s about a failed system,” Obi wrote on his official X handle. “These numbers are the direct result of years of poor planning, weak funding, and misplaced national priorities.”
Obi, a long-time advocate for education reform, lamented that Nigeria — Africa’s most populous nation — has just around two million university students in total. In contrast, Bangladesh’s National University alone hosts over 3.4 million students, despite the country having fewer people.
He also referenced Turkey’s 7-million-strong university population as a sign of what purposeful investment can achieve. “Education is not a luxury; it is the foundation of national development,” he stated. “It is how we prepare our young people to lead, to create, and to secure our future.”
Obi urged federal and state governments to stop treating education as an afterthought and begin to treat it as a matter of survival and strategy. “Without a literate and skilled population, we cannot compete globally, reduce poverty, or fight insecurity,” he emphasized.
Calling for aggressive and targeted investments in basic and tertiary education, Obi concluded with his trademark optimism: “A New Nigeria is POssible — but not without educated minds to build it.”