By Musbau Babatunde
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), has arrested about 15 proprietors of CBT centres over alleged engagement in dubious practices while registering candidates for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME.
Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede revealed that a total of 1.6 million candidates have been registered to sit for the examination.
Prof Oloyede, who disclosed this in Abuja on Monday during a monitoring tour of the registration in Abuja led by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Andrew David Adajo.
JAMB commenced the sale of 2023 UTME form on Saturday, 14th January, 2023, and was expected to close on Tuesday, 14th February, 2023.
But the Board extended the registration exercise as a result of the lingering naira crisis by one week, starting from Wednesday, February 15, 2023.
Earlier, Adejo explained that the extension was necessary to ensure all the candidates have time to register.
“Ordinarily, registration for UTME has closed but to take care of people that could, for one reason or another not be able to make the deadline of February 14th, especially as you know, most of registration processes depends on banks and we could not have top level bank operations from the past three weeks for understandable reasons,” he said.
He, however, said the turnout was very low because the first set of registration that ended on February 14th had virtually captured more than 98 per cent of people “so the people that are being captured now are those that are left over.”
“Today (Monday), for instance we only met three people. We asked the head of this centre how many were registered on Saturday and he said about 15 so I think the monitoring gave us the confidence that yes it was a good idea to extend so we don’t leave anybody out of the box,” he noted.
