Nigeria’s streak of systemic failure.
By Steve Ovirih.
Things don’t just fail suddenly. When failure occurs, the roadmap to such occurrence was dug overtime and was overlooked by those who should pay attention , thus when failure eventually happens, it will go to motive that it couldn’t have been a sudden development.
We are witnessing the gradual collapse of values, virtues and norms in the society today because several institutions of state that should proffer solution or offer enviable models have all succumbed to ‘the business as usual’ ways of doing things. Let us pick the judiciary for example. I was at a forum not quite long where the guest speaker , a human right crusader of note, bemoaned the sudden fusion between some highly placed members of The Bench and some ‘oligarchs’ in the system.
His words not verbatim: ” the Bench is seen and should be seen at all times as the cradle of equity that should not at anytime mix with the high and the mighty in the society. The sanctity of The Bench presupposes that the humans who by dint of their professionalism and good moral standing after years of unblemished legal practice are elevated thereto and they remain arrow heads who exude confidence in jurisprudence and whose pronouncement cannot be doubted even when placed in the Bunsen burner of legal review.
” We all are living witnesses to the legal savvy and redoubtable judicial pronouncements of their Lordships, Justice Teslim Elias, the first Nigerian to earn a Doctorate in Law through published works, Justice C.J. Morgan , the Lord Chief Judge who recommended Justice Eso for appointment as Acting Judge , Justice FRA Williams, the inimitable Justice Obakayode Samuel Eso, Justice Oputa, Justice Mohammed Bello and other Justices of exemplary reckoning.Even when there is no evidence that they lived a sedentary life, there is still no evidence of their hobnobbing in suspicious camaraderie with topnotch politicians either on the Golf Course, Convocation ground or high octane party where there is much frolicking and endless fun. While this is not an attempt to censure anybody’s movement and freedom, who a person mingles with says much about the person, how much less, jurists who are relied on to give make or mar pronouncements in their daily activities of adjudication of justice.”
Long story cut shut, the image of the judiciary based on the recent decisions of the National Judiciary Commission ( NJC) to slam some Judges over judgements that stand logic on its head is a reflection of our system that has continued to creak and crack in the eyes of conscious observers. Of course, it is the oligarchs that people of moral standing in the society should appeal to, to stay off the neck of our exemplary Jurists so that needless embraces won’t continue to taint the activities from The Bench in the eyes of concerned members of the public.
Systemic failure has totally bared its fang on our education.Talk of system collapse… search no further; the University Tertiary Matriculation Examination ( UTME) 2025 conducted by Joint Admission and Matriculation Board ( JAMB) gives proof of how terrible things have collapsed in that ‘live wire’ sector of the nation’s economy. When the result of the university admission examination was released, JAMB said out of two million who wrote the exam, not less than one million, five hundred candidates scored less than 200 point marks.This record showed that students in their mass failed JAMB examination! Even the Honorable Minister of Education clapped in appreciation of how the outcome has reflected government’s stride in stamping out examination malpractice. Finally, the jury is out: technical glitch, so JAMB claimed, had affected the result of not less than three hundred thousand JAMB candidates, part of those the exam body had earlier claimed failed JAMB woefully. The rot in the administration of examination in Nigeria is what we have just witnessed and fact is if protests had not hit the social media by candidates, their parents and concerned education stakeholders, who knows? The glitch could have been ignored while JAMB candidates of this year would have lived with the ugly stereotype of being dull and unintelligent students.
Yes, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede , JAMB Registrar ‘per excellence’ and an accountable public officer was remorseful enough on a live broadcast to admit that some results were marred by technical glitch; going further , he went magnanimous by announcing that some 300,000 and more candidates will re write the exam barely a week after they had been tagged ‘ failure in test and measurement.’ Unfortunately, a female student in Ikorodu, Lagos, a certain Miss.Opetusin committed suicide having seen her result in which she had scored less than 200 , a worse off result compared to her last JAMB exam. Ironically, House Committee on Education pronounced its own jury after intelligence gathering and due diligence that rather than technical glitch, human error caused the mass failure of UTME 2025. Systemic failure in the educational system of the largest black nation of the world doesn’t get messier than this. University admission tests of promising Nigerian youths succumbed to human cum technical error and as they say in the street ‘ nothing spoil!’ No head rolled, nobody held accountabe. The JAMB boss has said ‘sorry’ to Nigerians. Case closed! What is the prospect that same glitches won’t repeat itself again? A more worrisome prospect stares the nation in the face and nobody seems to be worried: the Minister of Education, Dr.Alausa has maintained that School Certificate examinations will be migrating to the Computer Based Test template effective 2026, yet in 2025 technical glitches marred JAMB outcome. How prepared are the examining bodies and students for CBT? It will be double standard if the lot of students in the hinterland whose majority have not even seen a computer system before are migrated to Computer Based Test. Stakeholders have their advocacy well tailored out here!
Need we glimpse the systemic failure in INEC? Electoral Acts or not, the challenge of navigating the complexities of the electoral process to a hitch free, glitch free logical conclusion is apparently a wide, wild dream. It was instructive that Late President Umar Musa Yar’dua , another good man who left quite soon, admitted openly that the electoral process that yielded him the Presidency was fraught with irregularity. Even if subsequent others will ignore this reality, the fact remains rot in the system if not cleansed, will continue to make elections to tilt towards questionable end. We have been treated to how a Professor who presided over a faulty election filled with man made error sincerely committed out of insincerity to his oath of election coordination has been sent to prison; a good example to teach others not to go the way of ‘the naughty Professor.’ His guilt was established because someone felt aggrieved that electoral process had been fraudulently scaled against him. Stories of these cheats of people’s confidence at election abound everywhere , all contributing to the rot crumbling hope in a sustained system.
Talking about politicians and how their activities have successfully collapsed the moral fibre will take a whole day lecture. Civil servants fraudulently amassing wealth from the public till is another embarrassing eye sore. From Pension fraud to Emefiele gate, to Arms deal scandal, NNPC records and many more. The list rises to the high heavens.Armnesty International has a record of our corruption index in a way that is sickening as each time they do global rating, the nation is not found wanting. When it comes to corruption, there is a soaring index to the effect that economic saboteurs abound in huge population in the nation.
As long as these streaks of systemic failure obvious in every facet of the nation are not checked by the resolve of the leaders and the led to do things right, there will continue to be loss of trust in the system. And what is left of a system that exudes loss of trust in all extant institutions?
