Prof Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar, Joint Admissions and
Matriculation Board (JAMB), has slammed Nigerians that have been making
jokes out of the missing N36m from the board’s office in Makurdi, Benue
State.
The JAMB boss was reacting to the recent claim by Philomena Chieshe, a
sales clerk in JAMB office, Makurdi that her housemaid connived with
another JAMB staff, Joan Asen, to “spiritually” swallow N36m from the
vault in her office.
In her confessional statement while being interrogated by a team of
auditors, she said that Joan Asen and her accomplices confessed that
they had been stealing the money “spiritually” through a mysterious
snake that always sneaked into the office to swallow the money from the
vault.
Oloyede, who appeared in Focus, a morning programme on AIT, said it
is quite unfortunate that Nigerians have decided to turn the incident
into a joke, thereby celebrating mediocrity.
According to him, “That is Nigerians for you, making jokes out of
serious issue. I didn’t find it funny since the story broke out because I
think as a nation with a future, rather than celebrating those
achieving success, we are busy celebrating people who should be caned.
“You turned serious issue into to a national or an international
joke. There are many snakes in other establishment but because those
overseeing them are also snakes, that is why they could not be able to
identify those snakes.
“Rather than creating an impression that JAMB is extraordinarily bad,
they should give us a lesson to check where we went wrong.”
