Inside the engineering decisions, system failures, and breakthroughs behind one of Nigeria’s most demanding public-sector tech deployments.
When academic infrastructures fails, the consequences are immediate, missed exams, lost of data, public distrust, and policy setbacks. When it works, it often does so quietly. In Ekiti State, Nigeria, a digital examination and student registration platform (EKS Exams) did exactly that: it worked at scale, under pressure, and across unreliable internet areas across the state.
The brain behind this innovative project is Gospel Jonathan, a backend-oriented software engineer who conceptualised and led the technical development and deployment of a platform that effectively on-boarded over 28,000 students from across 750 secondary schools, many of which are located in rural communities where are no internet network connectivity.
What makes this project very important is not solely its scope, but how it was built to address the specific infrastructure limitations in Africa.
In early 2024, Ekiti State’s Ministry of Education faced a critical challenge, a challenge that dealt with the existing examination platform,making it unreliable, even when national exams were only a few weeks away. The state needed a replacement system-fast and that was how Purplebee Technologies, a software development company was hired to lead the engineering effort for a statewide solution that would handle student registration, identity verification, school quotas, and ministry-level reporting with Mr Gospel Jonathan as the team lead on this remarkable project.
The constraints were severe:
• Less than two months to deliver
• Minimal engineering manpower
• Thousands of concurrent users expected
• Schools operating with unstable or no internet access
“It wasn’t a theoretical system,” Jonathan explains. “This was live government infrastructure with no room for failure.” Despite the limited time and resources, Jonathan and his team ensured they could prioritised some of the most efficient and battle tested technologies that could help bring the project to live in no time without compromising reliability. Some of the back-end technologies such as Laravel and MySQL were selected. Laravel formed the backbone of this system, as it enables rapid development through built-in authentication, routing, and database abstraction. For persistence, MySQL was employed for its transaction effectiveness, guarantees, ACID compliance, and ability it’s ability to handle high-volume concurrent writes. Careful indexing, query optimisation, and atomic transactions ensured data integrity even during peak registration periods.
The front-end technology was built with React with Offline-First Logic, focusing on modular forms and dashboards. Recognising Nigeria’s connectivity realities, Jonathan and his team implemented an offline-first architecture using IndexedDB allowing schools to be able to complete student registrations entirely offline. Once connectivity was restored, data synchronised automatically with the central server using batching, retries, and conflict-resolution logic.
DigitalOcean was selected for the hosting infrastructure due to it’s fast provisioning and vertical scalability. Built-in monitoring tools also assisted in real time detection of CPU, memory, and disk usage as traffic surged. with Cloudinary, the team where able to manage possessions of images, editing, and storage on a large scale.
As registrations opened, the platform moved rapidly from hundreds to thousands of simultaneous users. According to Jonathan, who was the team lead, they witnessed server performance degrade at around 1,000 concurrent entries with memory and disk VO maxed. With no time to introduce load balancers or container orchestration, Jonathan and his team opted for vertical scaling, immediately increasing RAM and disk throughput while analysing slow queries with monitoring tools. Later, at nearly 20,000 parallel users, a more subtle failure emerged: image uploads began failing silently.
The cause was traced to exceeded Cloudinary quotas, with no alerts in place. While the backend remained stable, a third-party dependency had become a single point of failure.
The fix involved:
• Upgrading Cloudinary storage and transformation limits.
• Introducing real-time monitoring and quota alerts.
• Implementing upload retry and resume logic on the frontend.
Within hours, the issue was resolved and by the close of registration:
• 28,000 students successfully on-boarded.
• 750 schools registered without data loss.
• Offline registrations synced seamlessly.
• Ministry-level reports generated in PDF format.
• Analytics available by gender, LGA, school, and subject.
Most importantly, the examinations proceeded without disruption, restoring confidence in government run digital systems.
This project offers a compelling lesson for Nigeria and Africa at large: Digital public infrastructure does not need perfect conditions-it needs resilient design.
By prioritising offline-first workflows, transactional databases, and proactive monitoring, Jonathan’s work demonstrates how locally built systems can support national-scale use cases.
It also challenges a common assumption: that government-grade technology must be imported. The engineering talent to build it already exists.
What began as an emergency replacement system has become a reference model for education technology in Nigeria’s public sector. With its foundation proven, the platform can evolve into broader education data infrastructure supporting analytics, national integrations, and future digital assessments.
