*Photo: Professor Ishaq Olanrewaju Oloyede *
Professor Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede’s tenure as the Registrar and Chief Executive of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) ends on 31 July, 2026. He was first appointed into the position by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 for a five-year term and, upon outstanding performance, the appointment was renewed in 2021. Prior to this appointment, he had been a quintessential academic and vastly experienced university administrator.
He was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin from 2007 to 2012. Professor Oloyede has also been the Chairman of the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors from 2011 to 2012. At the international level, he was, among other positions, the President of the Association of African Universities from 2009 to 2011 and he was the Secretary-General of the Association of West African Universities from 2013 to 2017. He was, in addition, the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of Fountain University, Osogbo, Osun State, Nigeria, from 2015 to 2019.
In these capacities, Professor Oloyede has constantly proved former US First Lady Michelle Obama right when she observed regarding her husband’s consistency of character: “Being president doesn’t change who you are – it reveals who you are.” Like President Obama, Professor Oloyede has unalterably remained himself in the different elevated offices he has held. He has been there for his old friends at critical moments and has encouraged them to attain national and international ascendancy. It is therefore assured that he would enter and adjust to post-JAMB life with relative ease having poured water ahead and guaranteed to tread on comfortable and secure cool ground.
With respect to his public life, more broadly, all sorts of people who have had cause to relate with or observe him, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, have profusely poured encomiums on him. In fact, just on 20 July, 2026, a group of very senior media personalities under the auspices of the Media and Civil Society Group for JAMB honoured Professor Oloyede with an appreciation visit for “a tenure marked by integrity, professionalism, diligence and an unwavering commitment to public good.”
Moreover, on 22 July, 2026, the Borno State government donated a regional office and 500-seater Computer-Based Test (CBT) centre to JAMB and the Governor, Professor Umara Zulum, named the facility the “Professor Ishaq Oloyede Maiduguri JAMB Zonal Office and CBT Centre” in honour of the gloriously-exiting JAMB Registrar whom he described as a “dedicated” and “hardworking” personality whose “integrity” is “never in doubt.”
Being the seasoned academic that he is, Professor Oloyede, as Registrar of JAMB, has continued to intervene intellectually in matters that concern his primary constituency, the academia. One of the highly controversial issues on which he has brought his competence and experience to bear was the Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System (IPPIS). On the system, the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation states as follows on its website: “IPPIS is one of the Transformation agenda of the Federal Government of Nigeria with the aim of creating a centralised database system for Nigerian Public Service with single, accurate source of Employee information that provides integration with other business application.”
The website also lists the objectives of IPPIS as to “provide a centralised database to aid Government’s manpower planning and decision making; facilitate automation & storage of personnel records to support monitoring of staff emolument payments against budget;
prevent wastage and leakages by ensuring staff remuneration is based on factually correct information; ensure prompt payment of salaries directly to Employees Account with appropriate deductions and remittances of 3rd party payments (e.g., Tax, Pension, Cooperatives, Union Dues and Bank Loans).”
However, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) did not share this romantic view of IPPIS. In fact, the union had serious misgivings about the salary payment platform. First, the union was of the view that it was a World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed system which was detrimental to the sovereignty of Nigeria, especially since the union believed that a homegrown alternative which would not be an economic burden on the country was possible to create. The union was also of the view that IPPIS undermined university autonomy and lacked transparency and was therefore subject to abuse. Moreover, ASUU was of the view that IPPIS was inconsistent with the flexibility that allowed universities to attract and appoint quality academic staff on visiting or permanent basis.
The Congress of University Academics (CONUA), the alternative academic staff union in the Nigerian university system, was also sufficiently concerned about IPPIS that it sought and got an appointment with the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed. In the Minister’s team at the meeting which held on 14 November, 2019 were the former Accountant General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, the Director of IPPIS and a range of technical and administrative members of staff of the ministry. The CONUA delegation included members of the National Steering Committee of the union and some stakeholders.
At the meeting, the areas of concern about IPPIS for which the union wanted clarification and assurance included the following: difficulty with paying sabbatical and other temporary members of staff for the intellectual enrichment of the university system; delay in paying promotion arrears; non-remittance or inefficient remittance of 3rd-party deductions such as those connected with cooperative societies; difficulty with solving salary non-payment or salary short-change and related problems sometimes requiring travelling to the IPPIS office in Abuja.
The Minster’s team assured the delegation that these issues could be easily addressed whenever they arose. The Ministry then promised that to facilitate the resolution of such problems, desk officers would be appointed in the bursary departments of the different universities, and they would be given the capacity to solve most if not all of these problems locally. Following the clarifications and assurances given by the Ministry, the National Steering Committee of CONUA reviewed the issues and advised its members to enrol on the IPPIS platform based on the government’s commitments to address the identified deficiencies.
Unfortunately, those commitments were not honoured and the assurances given by the Ministry were not implemented. In particular, the promised institutional mechanisms for resolving payroll issues were never established, thereby validating many of the concerns earlier expressed by CONUA, and aggravating the controversy.
Taking a dispassionate look at the IPPIS controversy, Professor Oloyede declared in a 7 December, 2019 Guardian (Nigeria) report of an interview he granted the newspaper: “The government should be cautious, because IPPIS might do more damage to the university system than good. My own position, not as JAMB Registrar, but as a Professor from a university and as somebody who had managed the university and had also been President of the Association of African Universities (AAU), and so has a fair view of what goes on in the university all over the world, is that we are swinging from one extreme to the other.”
He noted regarding the removal of the National Universities Commission’s erstwhile regulatory mechanisms for the finances of the universities: “Now, we have dismantled that structure and every university handles matters individually, independent of NUC, which is not even cost-effective. If you analyse how much every Vice-Chancellor spends in coming to and from Abuja on the issue of contacting the National Assembly or contacting IPPIS, they are not only spending money, they are also learning new tricks about corruption.”
He further remarked: “[Many] people may say universities are corrupt, yet, no sane person will assert that the universities are more corrupt than the public service. The civil service is stinking with corruption and the universities are still sane. But by the time we allow the undue and unregulated intermingling, you are going to transfer this poisonous dose into the university system and they are going to be the worse for it.”
He noted that contrary to ASUU’s position that centralised payment of salaries and emoluments of lecturer was not being operated in any country outside Nigeria, the payment system was being operated in around 10 African countries. He then observed with respect to the government’s presentation of IPPIS as a corruption-prevention platform that, contrariwise, IPPIS would only be an instrument of centralised corruption by the time the local safeguards have been removed from the institutions enrolled on the payment system.
Meanwhile, the Honourable Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator (Dr.) Chris Ngige, acting for the Federal Government of Nigeria, approached the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) to, among other pleas, determine whether ASUU had the right to embark on strike to compel the Federal Government to exempt the university system from IPPIS and compel the government to adopt the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) developed by ASUU.
On 30 May, 2026, the President of the NICN, Hon. Justice Benedict Kanyip, delivered judgement on the case as follows: “[The] rejection of UTAS in favour of IPPIS by the Federal Government is not in tandem with the letter and spirit of autonomy granted the Universities by the Universities (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Amendment) Act 2003 and even the acknowledgement in Exhibit 4 ‘that any other payments outside the consolidated salary as offered by Government would be borne by the respective Governing Councils of the Universities’. If it is within the remit of University Councils to do this, it can as well be within their remit to ascertain the payment platform of their salaries. This being so, I must answer referral issue D against the claimants. The claimants were wrong to have imposed IPPIS on the defendant. I so rule.”
Incidentally, the former Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris, who was part of the Minister’s meeting with CONUA, has been alleged to have misappropriated an estimated N109.5 billion naira through the IPPIS and related payment platforms, and the Federal High Court, Abuja, has granted an order of interim forfeiture of sums and assets linked to the alleged fraud and recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Moreover, on 13 July, 2026, the Federal High Court in Abuja directed the final forfeiture of N941.9 million linked to IPPIS fraud and recovered by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission. These have made Professor Oloyede’s prognostication about the IPPIS being a potential platform for centralised corruption to come true.
At a point when despondency was growing and hope was fading that Nigeria could ever again have dedicated, patriotic and altruistic public office holders, Professor Is-haq Oloyede popped up on the national scene, restored hope and provided a visionary and exemplary template for national rebirth and development. As an Islamic scholar of global standing, Professor Oloyede is familiar with Verse 84 of Chapter 26 of the Qur’an and most certainly would have said this prayer very many times: “And grant me an honourable mention in later generations.” From all indications, Allah has answered his prayers.