THE Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, on Wednesday, says it recorded about 17,758 late applications for year 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), just as it will conduct mop up examination for candidates who registered late.
JAMB Registrar, Prof. Isaq Oloyede, said the late registration took place in all its offices across the country.
Oloyede disclosed this in Lagos, at the JAMB Lagos Office where he monitored the exercise.
He said as at the close of the registration within the stipulated period, about 1.4 million candidates registered for the examination contrary to over 2 million candidates who registered last year.
“One of the gains of the introduction of National Identification Number is that we are able to know the real number of prospective candidates sitting for our examination.
“When the noise was too vociferous and over 600,000 candidates were unable to register because of NIN issues, we came up with the idea of asking people with genuine complaints to come out and register.
We asked them to buy bank draft and come over to our offices with their cases and we registered them.
“That started on June 2 till June 11. As at June 8, only 17,758 candidates have registered across the country.
“The question is, where are the 600,000 that have allegedly been shut out? That means before the introduction of NIN, many were involved in double registration or registration by proxies.
“” We now have the real figure of prospective candidates we should prepare for. Also, the noise being made about crowded offices across the nation is also untrue. Frm what we have in our Lagos office, it is clear that we have more proxies than applicants.
“Also, we have interacted with some applicants and parents to find out if they were having difficulties in their registration
“Findings revealed that some were sending wrong messages to the specified codes while some were involved in multiple registration.
“Tutorial centres run by some people are fraudulent or holding candidates to ransom in one way or the other. Most of the challenges in registration are caused by overzealous parents and dubious tutorial centres owners,”he said.
Giving the breakdown of the figures of the late applications, he said, “Lagos had 3,200, Kwara 1,300, Abuja 1,300, Oyo 1,000, Kano 1,000 among others,”
On how the Board would handle the case of late registration, Oloyede explained that after the main examination, there would be a mop process
He also accused some private school owners of circumventing due process.
“Recently, the Lagos State Government penalised some private schools for engaging in examination malpractices during last year’s West African Senior Secondary School Examinations, WASSCE. I recommend that the government deregister such schools and make their names public.” He added.
