The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board(JAMB) has announced that it will conduct mop up examination for candidates who registered late for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, (UTME) over the National Identity Number(NIN) issues, among other genuine registration challenges.
The JAMB’s Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede announced this on Wednesday in Lagos while monitoring profiling of candidates with 2021 UTME registration challenges.
Addressing Newsmen, Oloyede said, ”So far, we have just 17, 758 candidates with challenges that had been profiled, nationwide.”
“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 exam.
That started in June 2 and will end on June 11, as at June 8, only 17,758 candidates have come out to register across the country.
Then, the question is, where are the 600,000 that have allegedly been shut out? To me, before the introduction of NIN, many were involved in double registration and even registration by proxies.
“ We now have the real figure of prospective candidates we should prepare for. Also, the noise being made about a large number of crowd in our offices across the nation is also not true. Even from what we have in our Lagos office, it is clear that we have more parents here than real applicants.
“Also, we have interacted with applicants and some parents and found out the reasons some are having difficulties in registering. Some are sending wrong messages to the specified codes. Some are even sending from different phone numbers, which is not allowed. Some candidates even have more than one NIN.
“Tutorial centres run by some people are more than fraudulent as they not only extort candidates and their parents, but are holding candidates to ransom in one way or the other. Most of the problems candidates are having originate from some overzealous parents and dubious tutorial centre owners,”he said.
Giving the figures of the late prospective candidates that have so far registered, Oloyede 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 prospective candidates, Oloyede explained that after the main exam, a mop up one would be conducted for them.
”At the end of the entire exercise, we may have to conduct another examination for those with genuine cases after the main UTME slated for June 19 to July 3,” he added.
