Oloyede’s class act in public relations
July 29, 2026 12:36 am
By Lekan Sote
By the end of July 2026, Prof. Isha’q Oloyede would have ended his tenure as the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board with the dexterity, savvy and panache of a public relations maestro, who knows the workings of Nigeria’s media landscape and has successfully traversed it.
He says he does not mind it whenever the media criticises him, because he has found out that media men mean no harm, but only want him, or any other public official for that matter, to deliver better service and acknowledge that public officials will be held accountable to Nigerian citizens.
And that is the way it ought to be. Public officials should appreciate the constitutional role given to the mass media to “uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people” who occupy the highest office of the citizens of Nigeria.
At a meeting where he introduced Prof. Segun Aina, his successor, to a cohort of senior media professionals that someone described as “The Ancients”, he was described by JAMB’s media consultant, Najeem Jimoh, as a good brand that makes the job of anyone selling him to his publics easy. Shakespeare would have said that Oloyede is like wine that needs no bush (or advert).
According to Jimoh, Oloyede not only demonstrated a high level of competence and innovative genius as he carried out his duties as JAMB registrar, but he also ran the shop most transparently and made himself easily accessible and responsive to journalists of all ranks that may have any aught or angst against him or JAMB.
The best contrast to Oloyede is America’s President Donald Trump, who acts like a pain in the neck of all those who are unfortunate to be his Chief Press Secretary or White House Director of Communications. They are all having a hard time killing the public relations brush fires that he seems determined to ignite on a perennial scale.
Unlike the generally abrasive and unpredictable Trump, Oloyede makes the job of public relations, whose working definition is “public acknowledgement of good deeds”, the dream job that Americans sometimes describe as “easy peasy.”
After just one year in office as registrar, Oloyede remitted a whopping N7.8bn to the coffers of the Federal Government. From 2018, his second year in office, to the end of 2025, and after reducing its examination form fees, JAMB remitted N29.4bn, and projected 2026 remittance at N6bn, whereas in all the first 38 years of its existence JAMB remitted somewhere between N50m and N60m!
Of course, JAMB may not have been set up solely as a revenue-generating agency for the government, but Oloyede has been able to demonstrate that even agencies that have not been set up as commercial and profit-making enterprises can be run efficiently and profitably if the managers are competent and truthful.
When JAMB flagged the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination result of a candidate who falsified her score from 249 to 362 in 2023, and won a N3m award from Innoson Motors, it took Oloyede’s deft and mature handling to defuse the ethnic furore that was created by some “ethnic policemen and women” who didn’t look beyond the ethnic identity of the “faker”.
Despite JAMB’s assertion to the contrary, the young lady insisted that her score was not falsified. After the government of Anambra State set up an independent commission of enquiry to which she finally admitted that her score was forged, JAMB withdrew her actual report and imposed a three-year ban on her.
Though the House of Representatives, which was unnecessarily playing to the gallery, asked for a stay of action, the management of JAMB insisted that she must serve out the penalty, which ended in July 2026. This should serve as a deterrent to others of her ilk who may feel so inclined to falsify their results in such a brazen manner.
JAMB’s statement, which commended the “patriotic and unbiased posture” of Anambra State Government, read in part, “(The candidate) owned up in the presence of her principal and the Education Secretary that the narration by the JAMB officials was a true and correct description of what transpired. She also admitted having manipulated the result by herself unaided…”
One other attribute that catches the attention of any curious observer is how Oloyede, an Islamic and Arabic scholar, turned out to become outstandingly savvy in the deployment of digital technology to achieve the masterly act of foiling the antics of candidates who want to cheat while writing examinations conducted by JAMB under his watch.
It is not impossible that it was because Oloyede had so raised the bar of the use of digital technology in the operations of JAMB that the government could only find his successor in the 39-year-old Aina, who is an expert in computer engineering, Internet computing and network security, and has been described as a consultant and researcher in technology and problem solving.
Yet while Oloyede’s tenure has been widely acclaimed as honest, successful and remarkable, there have also been reports of technical glitches, mass failure of candidates and stressful early morning examination schedules for candidates.
In 2019 and 2024, there were cases of UTME candidates who committed suicide by drinking poisonous substances after respectively receiving poor scores of 176 and 146. Tragically, the candidate who killed herself in 2024 received an email message of her admission less than 30 minutes after the hospital confirmed that she had died.
In 2025, Oloyede broke down in tears and offered a public apology after the technical glitch, attributed to the negligence of the service providers that JAMB hired to manage the examination portal, distorted the results of nearly 380,000 candidates.
Oloyede’s response is probably the hallmark of a man who has empathy for others and accepts responsibility for the trauma that was caused to a large number of UTME candidates, even if he did not personally run the system that ran into a glitch. Professional managers say that the liability of the servant is on the master who hired him.
But that incident nearly led to another ethnic blowout, because 173,387 of the affected candidates were spread across Nigeria’s Southeastern states. But tempers went down when it was discovered that 206,610 of the affected candidates took their examinations in Lagos State centres.
These shortcomings led to calls for his resignation, while some university administrators accused him of highhandedness and overly strict enforcement of a centralised admission process and breathing down hard on some of their sloppy colleagues whom he often called out in the open.
Oloyede may have survived these negative perceptions because of his ability to acknowledge his shortcomings, but also maintain his integrity, instead of presenting framed or “manufactured truths,” concocted by “public relations factories”.
Oloyede, who disclosed that his appointment as JAMB Registrar came to him as a surprise, and that he would prefer to return to academics and not to politics, cuts the image of a man who would be rewarded with more public service jobs for always doing a good job.
This Imam, who wields digital technology as if it were a scribe’s Qalam or reed pen, is a class act in public relations and should inspire studies by scholars for the advantage of public officials.
X:@lekansote1, lekansote.com
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