JAMB Dismisses Viral Video, Says 80,000 Write Rescheduled UTME 

Kemi Olaitan in Ibadan 

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, yesterday, dismissed a viral video by a self-acclaimed social media influencer, Saheed Oladele, who alleged that the board put a candidate, Aminat Suleiman, under undue stress to write UTME CBT examination. 

The board, also, disclosed that no fewer than 80,000 candidates sat for the rescheduled Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination across the country.

JAMB’s Head of Public Affairs, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, while speaking with journalists in Ibadan yesterday, said the video which circulated on social media in which the candidate accused JAMB of making her write the examination twice was false in its entirety.  

He said There was no way that a candidate would have filled Ibadan for his/her centre and JAMB placed such a candidate to Abuja and also placed him/her to write the examination repeatedly.

He stated that Aminat registered and submitted her form in  Gwagwalada local council, in Abuja, with no information to JAMB on her relocation. 

Benjamin disclosed that he came from Abuja to Ibadan to purposely clear JAMB of the allegation as that is not its way, appealing to Nigerians to always verify information and not take everything hook line and sinker. 

He said: “We just want to put some records straight. There has been a video going viral that Aminat Suleiman has repeatedly alleged JAMB that she is in Ibadan and she was asked to go to Abuja to write her examination. 

“There are two fundamental issues we want to establish. When she filled her form, did she pick Abuja or she picked Ibadan and JAMB pushed her to Abuja to write her exam? 

“Another thing is that, was she rescheduled to write this exam and rescheduled again? When we sent a message to her, the message was delivered to the contact she filled, who was the person that received the message?”

Oladele who apologised to JAMB on behalf of the candidate, said he was misled by the information given to him by Aminat, stating that he did the video because he thought the candidate was too young to be going through a lot of stress of writing the examination more than once. 

He lauded the examination body for being proactive and allowing the girl “to re-write her examination in Ibadan which he described as his major achievement. 

She did not write the exam twice in Abuja! She wrote it once but the second time she went to the centre because her elder sister that was receiving her messages was also receiving for the other sister because they are two. 

“When the message came, it was an anonymous message. They didn’t know the owner of the message and two of them went to the centre. The other girl was allowed in but she wasn’t allowed to enter the exam hall.” 

Meanwhile, Benjamin said about 80,000 candidates who could not sit for the 2023 UTME within their scheduled time owing to no fault of theirs, sat for the rescheduled UTME across the country.

He said candidates affected include those who were verified at their centres but could not sit the examination, those who could not be biometrically verified and those with mismatched data, among others.

Benjamin said the deployment of innovations in the conduct of the exam paid off as the exercise recorded the lowest reported cases of infractions. In this year’s UTME, the issue of examination malpractices was reduced to almost zero level,” he said.