There is a peculiar Nigerian ritual that never fails to amuse and appal in equal measure. A public official completes a lengthy tenure. The tributes flow like over-sweetened palm wine. Technology is praised. Transparency is celebrated. Staff welfare is lauded. The cost of forms is said to have fallen. Everyone nods sagely. Applause thunders. Gifts are exchanged. And then, with the delicacy of people tiptoeing around a sleeping python, the entire assembly carefully avoids mentioning the one subject that has defined the institution for years: the stubborn, recurring, occasionally reptilian problem of missing public money.
At the recent television and press send-off for the immediate past Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, this ritual reached a high art. The man who spent a decade at the helm was rightly credited with making JAMB more technology-driven, more orderly, and less of a cash-and-carry bazaar than the one he inherited. Fair enough. Reforms happened. Remittances improved. The board stopped resembling a particularly leaky colander. One can acknowledge progress without descending into hagiography.
Yet something rather large was missing from the script. Not a polite omission. Not a delicate discretion. A full-blown, air-conditioned, microphone-enabled silence about the high-profile corruption scandals and criminal litigation that have trailed the institution for years. Some of these scandals predated Oloyede. Some unfolded on his watch. None, it must be stressed, have produced allegations against the professor himself. That distinction matters. But institutional leadership is not a personal hygiene exercise. Things that happen under one’s tenure, even if one did not personally pocket the cash, remain part of the record. And the record, at that glittering gathering, was treated like an embarrassing relative one pretends is not in the room.
Remember the snake? In 2018, while Oloyede was already Registrar, auditors examining the Makurdi office discovered that roughly ₦35–36 million collected from the sale of registration scratch cards between 2014 and 2016 had vanished. The commercial clerk’s explanation was the stuff of Nigerian legend: a mysterious or spiritual snake had swallowed the money from the vault. The claim went global. Memes were born. The nation laughed until it hurt. Staff were suspended. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was invited. The episode became permanent shorthand for official absurdity. Oloyede later insisted the underlying discrepancy predated his arrival and that he had insisted the bizarre account be recorded precisely because it was unbelievable. All true, as far as it goes. Yet the discovery, the investigation, the public humiliation, and the lingering questions about internal controls all occurred during his decade. At the farewell, one might have expected even a passing reference to how the reforms he championed were designed to make such zoological excuses impossible. Instead: crickets. Loud, dignified, institutional crickets.
Then there is the larger shadow. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission has pursued the previous Registrar, Professor Dibu Ojerinde, over allegations involving the diversion of ₦5.2 billion across his tenures at NECO and JAMB. Assets have been seized. Properties in Abuja and even unregistered houses in Florida have surfaced. Family members and private companies have been drawn into parallel charges. Trials have staggered forward, stalled by adjournments, no-case submissions, and on-again-off-again settlement talks that appear to prefer the comfort of negotiation over the inconvenience of a full defence. The cases continue to drift through the Federal High Court calendar into 2026. None of this is ancient history. None of it is irrelevant to the institutional culture Oloyede inherited and, by his own account, sought to cleanse. Yet at the send-off, the subject was treated as though it belonged to another country.
This is not an attempt to smear a man against whom no personal allegations have been made. It is an observation about what Nigerian public life has trained itself to do: celebrate the individual while quietly burying the system’s pathologies. The press, which turned up in force with cameras and microphones, largely played along. One would have thought the most interesting journalistic question available was how the celebrated reforms interacted with the legacy of missing millions, fantastical reptiles, and multi-billion-naira charges still grinding through the courts. Instead, the coverage preferred the safer terrain of tributes, technology, and staff welfare packages. Accountability, it seems, is for the other fellow’s send-off.
Something remains rotten in the state of Denmark, or at least in the state of our institutional memory. A decade is long enough for both achievement and unfinished business. A farewell is the perfect moment to measure both. When the cameras roll and the speeches soar, and the most consequential questions about the organisation’s chronic illness are left unasked, the silence itself becomes the story. It is not merely a missed opportunity. It is a small, polished mirror held up to a country that still prefers applause to accounting. And the snake, one suspects, is still somewhere in the building, waiting for the next inventory.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 