Immediate Past JAMB Reg, Prof Is-haq Oloyede and His Cap of Many Feathers

Some public servants occupy office, and there are those who transform it. Professor Is-haq Oloyede belongs firmly in the second category, and as his decade-long tenure as Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board draws to a close in 2026, Nigeria's education sector is reckoning with the full weight of what one determined man can accomplish when he refuses to accept that corruption is simply how things work.

Oloyede walked into JAMB on August 1, 2016, and inherited an institution that had become shorthand for everything wrong with Nigerian bureaucracy. Leaking finances. Compromised examinations. An admission process so riddled with human manipulation that merit had become almost accidental. The public had long stopped trusting JAMB. Many wondered whether the agency was even worth saving.

Howbeit, Prof decided it was.

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What followed was not a modest cleanup but a systematic dismantling and rebuilding of how one of Nigeria's most consequential agencies operated. The financial story alone is staggering. Where his predecessors had collectively remitted a mere N50 million to the Federal Government's coffers, Oloyede's JAMB has returned over N50 billion,  a thousandfold difference that cannot be explained away by inflation or luck. It is the arithmetic of plugged leakages, enforced accountability, and a registrar who appeared to have no interest in the customary arrangements that had made his predecessors comfortable and the agency poor.

His modernisation of the Computer-Based Test system proved equally consequential. Examination fraud, for so long treated as an unmovable fixture of Nigerian student life, began to crack under the pressure of tightened security protocols and reformed registration processes. Reported malpractice cases dropped from 123 in 2024 to 85 in 2025, and further still to just 52 in 2026. These are not cosmetic numbers. Behind each of those declining figures is a generation of students whose results can be trusted and institutions whose admissions are worth something.

Perhaps the most structurally significant of Oloyede's contributions, however, is the Central Admissions Processing System, launched in 2017. Before CAPS, admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions was a murky transaction in which human discretion and all the opportunities for abuse that discretion invites played an outsized role. CAPS changed the architecture entirely. Merit became the operating principle. Institutions recovered genuine autonomy over their admission decisions. Candidates could track their admission status in real time and exercise the unprecedented power to accept or reject offers. Undersubscribed institutions gained access to a transparent marketplace of prospective students. A process that had been opaque by design was forced into the light.

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It is worth pausing on what this means in practice. Every year, hundreds of thousands of young Nigerians sit the UTME, each carrying the anxious hope that a university place awaits them on the other side. For decades, whether that hope was fulfilled depended not just on a candidate's score but on factors they could neither see nor influence. Oloyede did not eliminate every injustice in Nigerian education; no single administrator could, but he made the entry point fairer than it had ever been, and he built systems designed to keep it that way after he is gone.

Before JAMB, there was Unilorin. Oloyede's tenure as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin had already established him as a man who brought genuine intellectual rigour and institutional seriousness to everything he touched. The awards followed, as they tend to when performance is real rather than performed.

ALSO READ: From Exam Body to National Model: Cleric Crowns Oloyede's JAMB Tenure a 'Golden Age'

The international dimension of his legacy arrived at the 2026 Policy Meeting on Admissions held in Abuja, where Sierra Leone's Deputy Minister of Education announced that his country would establish its own centralised admissions management agency, modelled directly on JAMB, effective May 27, 2026. That a West African neighbour looked at an institution once defined by dysfunction and decided to replicate its current form is perhaps the most eloquent external verdict on what Oloyede built.

Nigeria does not have an abundance of public officials about whom such things can be said. The country is more accustomed to agencies that shrink under their leadership in credibility, in finances, and in public trust. Oloyede ran a different kind of operation: one that grew in all those measures simultaneously, over ten years, without the wheels coming off.

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As he prepares to hand over, the question that matters is whether what he built will outlast him. CAPS, the CBT infrastructure, the financial discipline, the culture of accountability, these are institutional features, not personal ones. They were designed to be inherited. Whether his successor embraces or erodes them will say something important about whether Nigeria is capable of compounding institutional gains rather than resetting them with every change of guard.

For now, Professor Is-haq Oloyede exits with his cap full. The feathers he has earned as reformer, administrator, anti-corruption champion, and unlikely architect of a functioning public institution are not decorative. They were won in the kind of daily, unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines but quietly changes what is possible.

Nigeria has seen what JAMB can look like when it is run well. That knowledge, at least, is permanent.

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