The University of Nigeria, Nsukka chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has threatened legal action against the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).
This follows what it describes as a widespread and intentional failure of candidates, mostly from the South East, in the recently concluded 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Chairman of ASUU-UNN, Comrade Óyibo Eze, revealed the union’s concerns while speaking to journalists in Nsukka on Wednesday.
He alleged that the mass failure was not coincidental, but part of a deliberate strategy to exclude children from the South East from gaining university admission.
“My office has been inundated with protests, calls, and visits by parents and the general public on this deliberate massive failure in the 2025 JAMB examination,” he stated.
Eze stressed that unless JAMB reassesses the results and awards deserving candidates their true scores, the union would seek legal redress in court.
According to him, candidates from the Southeast often need higher scores to secure admission, unlike students in other regions who get admitted with significantly lower marks.
“JAMB knows that children from the South East must score higher before they can get admission, whereas their counterparts in some parts of the country will use a 120 JAMB score to get admission to read medicine in universities in their area,” he said.
He further disclosed that out of the 1,955,069 candidates who participated in the 2025 UTME, over 1.5 million scored below 200, with a large percentage of them coming from the South East and Lagos, where many Igbo families reside.
Eze urged governors from the South East to actively resist what he termed as an educational injustice.
“The governors in the zone should not sit and watch JAMB toy with the academic future of our children,” he warned.
He clarified that ASUU is not opposed to penalising candidates involved in malpractice, but criticised the idea of collectively punishing all candidates in affected centres.
“I am not against the board punishing those found guilty of exam malpractice, but JAMB should not, because of these few candidates, fail the whole candidates in an exam centre,” he added.
Eze was particularly outraged that students from the University Secondary School, Nsukka—known for their academic excellence—did not have a single candidate score 200 or above.
“This school has superlative students who have excelled in academics both inside and outside the school, but how come all of them scored less than 200 in the exam?” he questioned.
He urged JAMB to quickly review the results before the situation escalates further, warning that a nationwide protest could erupt if no action is taken.
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