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The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) was established in 1952 by an Act of the British colonial parliament as a regional examining body serving Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, the Gambia and (later) Liberia. The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) was established by Decree 2 of 1978 (effective 1 April 1977 as a body, first examinations conducted in 1978) by the Obasanjo military government to standardise the previously fragmented university entrance system. Together they have set the examinations through which essentially every Nigerian graduate must pass.
The malpractice industry is now older than most of its current participants. The most documented episodes:
- 'Expo' (paper-leak) culture: Documented from the mid-1980s, accelerated through the 1990s. The 1995 WAEC SSCE was the first national examination at which mass-leakage was officially acknowledged. Re-sits ordered for two subjects across all of Nigeria.
- 'Miracle Centres' (1995–2018): Private secondary schools, predominantly in Rivers, Delta, Imo, Anambra, Abia, Cross River and Akwa Ibom states, that openly advertised their ability to deliver organised malpractice support during WAEC/NECO examinations. WAEC's annual blacklist routinely listed 250–500 centres a year.
- 2009 — JAMB UME Major Leak: Mathematics and Use of English papers leaked across multiple states. Partial re-sit ordered.
- 2013 — JAMB UME 'Pin Vending' Scandal: Federal investigation into the sale of UME scratch-card PIN codes through agents in pre-examination weeks.
- 2015 — Computer-Based Testing (CBT) Transition: JAMB Registrar Dibu Ojerinde introduced full CBT for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) — the most consequential single reform in JAMB's history. CBT eliminated the wholesale paper-leak phenomenon at the UTME level (the question pool is randomised at terminal).
- 2017 — Is'haq Oloyede Era at JAMB: Oloyede (still Registrar in 2024) inherited the CBT system, expanded the question bank to over 60,000 items, and made JAMB the most documented public-sector financial-remittance reformer of the Buhari era — JAMB remitted over ₦50 billion to the Consolidated Revenue Fund between 2017 and 2023, against ₦52 million remitted in the entire history of the agency before 2017.
- 2024 — JAMB UTME Mass-Failure Controversy: 76 percent of candidates scored below 200/400. Public debate split between those who attributed the result to system rigour finally working, and those who attributed it to systemic learning collapse during the 2020–2022 COVID and ASUU period. See also ASUU Strikes Register.