After waiting without a response from President Muhammadu Buhari, to either announce his replacement or reappointment, the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Alhaji Is-haq Oloyede, on Monday handed over to the agency’s director of information technology services, Mr. Fabian Okoro.
First News reliably gathered that some person’s in the Board recently filed some graft-related petition to the Presidency, which may have informed the delay in deciding whether or not to respond the JAMB boss.
Oloyede, however, has been reported for diligent remiting of huge sums in the region of N5bn to the federal government purse, which on an occasion attracted commendation from a serving finance minister.
Okoro, who is now to act as Registrar, joined the JAMB in 1993 as a programmer and was appointed a deputy director in 2018, and is said to be the most senior director in the establishment.
Other directors, including those of quality assurance department, and test development department, Mabel Egberaku and David Akanbi respectively, who also joined the agency in 1993, were reportedly appointed directors after Okoro.
But the JAMB’s director of test administration, Yusuf Lawal, who was employed by the agency in 1989, and is senior to Mr Okoro in ranking, is currently away out of the examination body for training.
The former registrar’s decision to hand over to Okoro might have been informed by a directive of the ministry of education that all the concerned chief executives should hand over to the most senior directors in their agencies.
Oloyede, who was appointed as the Registrar of JAMB on August 1, 2016, and inaugurated a day after, replaced a professor of measurement, Dibu Ojerinde, who is currently arraigned on corruption charges.
Oloyede, who completed his five-year term of office at the weekend, has been praised by many for reportedly turning around the examination body, especially in the areas of financial discipline, accountability and war against examination malpractices.
A 1992 graduate of Computer Science at the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA), Okoro holds a Master of Science in Computer Science with option of internet computing from the University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom in 2007.
After working for JAMB as a programmer for three years, the new acting registrar was promoted as a senior programme in 1996 and became a chief system analyst in 2002 and an assistant director in 2006.
He is said to have contributed significantly to the reform in the information technology unit of the examination body having received nudge and support from Oloyede who reportedly brought new innovations to the body’s operations since his appointment five years ago.