More than four years after initiating a name correction request with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, a Kwara State University graduate is still waiting to receive her degree certificate, trapped in an administrative standoff between two government agencies with conflicting responses to the same correction.
Gloria Akinwande (not real name) finds herself in an unusual predicament: she has completed her university education, attended her convocation ceremony alongside over 8,000 fellow graduates in December 2025, and met all academic requirements, yet KWASU has withheld her certificate due to a name discrepancy that JAMB has refused to resolve since 2021.
The problem began when the National Identity Management Commission corrected an error in Akinwande’s middle name on her NIN slip in 2021. According to her, the commission acted swiftly, processing the correction without significant delay.
“In 2021, an error was made on the middle name on my NIN slip by the NIMC, and this made me request that the commission correct the error. It did not take the commission long to correct, and I was quite delighted with the development. This was because I thought all my problems had been resolved,” she told FIJ on Tuesday.
Believing the matter settled, Akinwande immediately submitted the same name correction request to JAMB in 2021, expecting the examination body to update its records accordingly. However, JAMB rejected her application in January 2022 with a response stating that her request was “contrary to my name correction data collected elsewhere.”
“After this, I also made the same name correction request to JAMB. This was in the same year NIMC made the correction to my name. However, JAMB failed to treat my request,” she said.
Akinwande described JAMB’s response as puzzling, noting that the rejection contradicted the correction already approved by NIMC. “In addition to the fact that JAMB’s response seemed alien to me, the examination body’s reluctance to treat my request further led to a bigger problem for me,” she explained.
The consequences became painfully clear at KWASU’s 13th Convocation Ceremony in December 2025. While her peers received their certificates, Akinwande was informed that the university could not issue hers due to the ongoing name discrepancy between her JAMB records and her other official documents.
“Unfortunately, and unlike my peers, I have not been given my degree certificate by the school because of the name discrepancy, and my pending name correction request with JAMB. I have been left hanging,” she said.
FIJ reached out to JAMB via email on Tuesday morning, requesting details on why Akinwande’s correction was rejected and why the matter has remained unresolved for four years. The examination body had not responded at press time.
As Akinwande’s case continues without resolution, it raises broader questions about interagency coordination, the consequences of conflicting bureaucratic decisions, and the vulnerability of students caught between systems that fail to communicate or align their records, potentially derailing careers and opportunities that depend on timely certificate issuance.
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