Professor Segun Aina assumed office as JAMB’s 6th Registrar on July 31, 2026, and on his fi rst day rolled out a five-year roadmap titled “JAMB 2031: Building Trust, Reducing Trauma.” Structured as ‘Project 2:5:7’ — two objectives, five pillars and seven flagship initiatives — the agenda signals intent with unusual clarity for a public institution. The problem is that clarity now invites scrutiny. With 2,243,816 candidates registering for UTME in 2026, a 10.5% jump from 2025 and nearly 38,000 of them underage, JAMB is managing a population larger than the entire annual applicant pool of most national admissions systems, and doing it in a single high-stakes sitting. The Board is also inheriting deep wounds. In 2025, technical failures across 157 centres left more than 1.5 million of 1.9 million candidates scoring below 200. Over 6,300 results were cancelled for biometric manipulation, a crisis severe enough that the former Registrar apologised publicly. In March 2026, the Board disclosed an AI-powered syndicate operating across 25 states that generated fake images and videos impersonating senior officials, forged identification cards and claimed direct links to the Minister of Education. More than 100 candidates were connected to the scheme, 83 confirmed to have paid, and three senior JAMB officials were recommended for dismissal. The fraud did not start in the exam hall. It started at registration, at the point where identity is supposed to be locked.
That context explains why the first pillar, integrity, cannot be treated as a compliance exercise. Aina has anchored it on ISO 27001 certification and verifiable systems. But certification means little if impersonation is still possible at the point of application. The most instructive benchmark is India. After widespread impersonation was uncovered in the 2024 medical entrance exams, India’s National Testing Agency moved in January 2026 to introduce facial biometric authentication and live photography at registration, cross-checked against national identity records. The logic is simple and brutal: verify identity before the candidate ever sits, because forensic clean-up after the fact is too late. JAMB’s syndicate case proves exactly why this matters. The fraud was built on fabricated identity at registration. If JAMB’s new verification systems only tighten exam-day checks and do not lock the front door, the Board will keep chasing the same criminals through the back.
The second pillar is service, and here the promise is a unified customer platform and proactive engagement with candidates and parents. The risk is that JAMB replaces several broken portals with one new broken portal. Rwanda offers a more useful reference. IremboGov, launched in 2014 as a public-private partnership, now functions as a single national gateway for over 240 government services. In February 2026 it was named Best Government Service in the World at the GovTech Prize in Dubai. It processes close to half a million requests every month, with about 80% completed entirely online. Government reports say it has saved citizens more than 120 million hours previously lost to travel and queuing, and cut service time by more than 80%. Irembo did not succeed because of fancy technology. It succeeded because it consolidated fragmented, agency-by-agency services into one coherent user experience and measured relentlessly whether people could complete transactions without help. For JAMB, that is the standard. A unified app and customer platform will only matter if a candidate in Sokoto can register, reprint a slip, check a result and lodge a complaint without visiting a CBT centre or paying an agent.
The third pillar, governance, is where technology can cause the most harm if it outpaces oversight. The clearest warning comes not from a success story but from a failure. In August 2020, England’s exam regulator Ofqual replaced cancelled A-level examinations with grades generated by a statistical algorithm. The algorithm downgraded nearly 40% of teacher-predicted grades and systematically penalised students in large, disadvantaged schools while favouring smaller private schools. Public outrage forced a reversal within days. The Ofqual chair resigned, followed by the most senior civil servant at the Department for Education. The postmortem was damning not because the statistics were complex, but because a life-altering algorithm was deployed without independent scrutiny, without transparency about how it worked, and without a credible appeals mechanism in place before results were released. JAMB is now moving in the same direction with AI-assisted fraud detection and algorithmic screening. Governance must therefore lead technology, not trail it. Every algorithmic decision the Board deploys needs independent review and a functioning appeals process built in from day one. Otherwise the next technical failure will not end in an apology, it will end in a collapse of public trust.
Technology itself is the fourth pillar, and it is the easiest to fund and the easiest to get wrong. The seven flagship initiatives lean heavily on infrastructure review, ISO 27001 certification, a unified mobile app and a paperless administrative system. Both India and Rwanda show that technology only delivers when it is judged by outcomes rather than inputs. The right questions are not how many servers were bought or how modern the app looks. The right questions are whether impersonation has dropped, whether the share of candidates who complete registration without an agent has risen, and whether data is actually secure. If technology is not built in service of integrity, service and governance, it will attract headlines and funding but fail quietly where it matters most — at the candidate’s experience.
The fifth pillar is partnership, and this is where specificity will separate intent from action. Aina has spoken of deepening collaboration with financial institutions, education bodies and international partners. Two institutions stand out as direct peers. UCAS, the UK’s centralised undergraduate admissions service, manages almost three million applications from around 700,000 people a year across more than 380 institutions. JAMB processed 2.24 million candidates this year alone, more than three times that number, compressed into one cycle. JAMB’s verification and fraud problem is structurally harder than UCAS’s, which is precisely why a formal knowledge exchange on candidate verification architecture and fraud detection at scale would be valuable. On the qualifications side, UK ENIC, formerly UK NARIC and now operated by Ecctis, is the UK’s official body for benchmarking international qualifications. It is a natural partner for JAMB’s Direct Entry process, which currently evaluates foreign-qualified candidates against Nigerian equivalency standards without a documented international benchmark. Partnerships in Nigerian public institutions have too often ended at signed memoranda and photographs. The test for JAMB will be whether it can point to documented relationships with deliverables within the next 12 months.
Taken together, the five pillars describe an institution trying to modernise in public, under pressure, while AI-enabled fraud has already found its way to the registration desk. The honest measure of “JAMB 2031” will not be visible this year. It will be visible when the Board can show that a new verification system has measurably reduced impersonation, that a single service platform has cut the time and cost for candidates, that governance structures prevented a technical or algorithmic failure from becoming a national crisis, and that partnerships have produced real changes in Direct Entry evaluation and fraud detection. Professor Aina diagnosed the inheritance correctly and early. Whether that candour survives contact with the next 2.2 million candidates is the only question that will actually matter.
