2023 UTME: 15 Arrested as JAMB Registers 1.6m Candidates

Kuni Tyessi in Abuja

No fewer than 1.6 million candidates have been registered for the 2023 Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) at the close of registration.

The Registrar of the Board, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this at the end of a joint monitoring exercise with the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr. David Adejo, in Abuja yesterday.

Oloyede, however, disclosed that in the cause of registration, 15 culprits were discovered to have defrauded the process, adding that the culprits have been apprehended and were currently detained.

He also disclosed that registration for direct entry candidates commenced yesterday.

According to him, “So far, we have registered about 1.6 million candidates because we do not expect more than that, and that is because the direct entry starts today (yesterday). We have the challenge of the normal people who want to defraud the process as we have been monitoring what has been happening.”

 The permanent secretary in his remarks said there was a need to extend the registration to give others the opportunity to register with the challenge of naira redesigning.

“This is especially because the registration process is dependent on bank operations, and we’ve not had the top level of bank operations in the last two to three weeks for understandable reasons,” he said.

Adejo noted that before the extension of registration for one week, JAMB had actually registered about 98 percent of candidates, saying no one would be left behind in its registration process. The exercise took place at one of the Computer-Based Centres (CBT), the Global Distance Learning Institute.