The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said that it may conduct a second 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) after the main exams for candidates with genuine registration challenges.

This is part of the examination body’s commitment to ensuring that every Nigerian child who wants a tertiary education would be given equal opportunity.

This disclosure was made by the Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, on Wednesday in Lagos while monitoring the profiling of candidates with 2021 UTME registration challenges.

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What the Registrar of JAMB is saying

Oloyede in his statement said, “So far, we have just 17, 758 candidates with challenges that had been profiled, nationwide. 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.

 Since I came here this morning and interacted with candidates, I have discovered that most of them are largely unserious and are basically the cause of most of their challenges.

We keep hearing flimsy excuses such as my lesson teacher used his phone to generate the profile code, our tutorial centre helped us to register and I was not in town.

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Other reasons advanced are:  I used my mother’s NIN to generate my profile code, my mummy did the registration for me,” he said

The JAMB boss said that some candidates were honest enough to say they did not have money to procure the UTME form.

He said, “We have also seen cases where rather than send their NIN to 55019, candidates sent it to 55012, while others sent the same command with postpaid phones rather than pre-paid.’’

Oloyede said that the activities of some tutorial centres remained a hindrance to efforts at sanitising the country’s education system as they have become a haven for examination malpractice.

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He, therefore, called on state ministries of education to regulate activities of tutorial centres as part of measures to save the education sector from collapse, expressing regrets that some parents were patronising them with delight.

He said, “These people are just introducing these candidates to how to beat the system, how to make sure that they get questions, particularly fake questions because they cannot get JAMB questions.

Another major challenge threatening the system is intruding parents. They are intruders, who will not allow these children to think rightly and do things on their own but want to hurriedly push them into primary, secondary and tertiary schools at very tender ages.

That is why many of them are prone and exposed to so many mistakes. In order to show the nation that the problem of registration is not what a section of the media is painting it to be, we came up with this initiative of asking all candidates with genuine excuses to visit our offices nationwide.”

What you should know

It was earlier reported that more than 500,000 candidates had claimed they were unable to register for the examination within the given time frame – before May 15.

JAMB also shifted the 2021 UTME from June 19 to July 3 as part of the outcome of a 2-day stakeholders’ meeting the board held in Abuja.

The candidates cited the inability to generate a profile code and difficulty in obtaining the National Identification Number (NIN).

The board had insisted that no candidate would be allowed to sit for the examination without providing the NIN.

Following the challenges, the board allowed a 2-week window for the affected people to lodge their complaints at its offices or registration centres and get help.