BY FOLASHADE KEHINDE
A total of 706,189 students were admitted illegally by universities, Colleges of Education, polytechnics and other institutions between 2017 and 2020, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board said on Tuesday.
The institutions involved in this menace, which the Board said had damaged the image of the nation, are spread across the geo-political zones of Nigeria.
The Registrar, JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, disclosed this during a Consultative Sensitisation Meeting with Select Stakeholders in Abuja.
He said statistics provided by the National Bureau of Statistics and similar agencies were rendered inaccurate by as high as 900 per cent, owing to the illegal admissions.
“JAMB is then made to supply radically different figures of entrants for the same year. In addition, misplaced pressure is annually mounted on JAMB to condone (or regularise) such illegal and improper admissions made three or four years earlier by the Heads of Institutions who in almost all the cases, are not the incumbent ones,” the JAMB registrar noted.
In all, about 114 universities accounted for 67.795 of the illegal admissions, while 137 polytechnics accounted for 489,918 cases. Eighty Colleges of Education were responsible for 142, 818 cases and 37 others (5,678).
According to Oloyede, such admissions are unknown to JAMB as prescribed by law even as the Minister of Education has assented to the Board’s plea for a last chance for culpable institutions and allies.
The institutions involved in the menace were said to have disregarded JAMB’s Central Admissions Processing System, which allows them to only admit candidates that meet the requirements.
Oloyede, however, disclosed that the Vice Chancellors, Rectors and Provosts of the affected institutions had admitted their mistakes and had sent formal letters of confession and disclosure to the JAMB Registrar.
Some universities indicted for illegal admissions include University of Jos (7,600); Benue State University (6,171); Olabisi Onabanjo University (5,669); Kwara State University (4, 281); Novena University (3,432); University of Nigeria, Nsukka (2,732); Imo State University (2,330); University of Nigeria, Nsukka (2,732); and University of Calabar (2,074).
Others are: NTA Television College (1,934); Baze University (1,717); Oduduwa University (1,450); Kaduna State College of Education (1,417); Tai Solarin University of Education (1,101); Al-qalam University (1,062); and Gombe State University (1,017), among others.
The JAMB registrar said, as a measure of mopping up the backlog of improperly admitted candidates, the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, aside from assenting to the Board’s plea for a last chance for the violators, “also approved the caveat that the culprits should, first and foremost, declare the number of candidates admitted outside CAPS between 2017 and 2020 by sending a formal letter of confession and disclosure to the JAMB Registrar.”
“Those minimally qualified would then be condoned to put an end to the period and finally put the matter to rest. The Board was then directed to launch massive campaigns to educate the public against accepting such illegal admissions henceforth,” Oloyede added.
