The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board has lamented the failure of prospective candidates for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination in Ogun to register at the various Computer Based Test centres across the state.
JAMB’s Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, who was on tour of registered CBT centres in the state, expressed worry why the candidates refused to visit other accredited centres for the registration, but decided to besiege the board’s state headquarters for the exercise.
When Oloyede visited the CBT centres located at the South West Resource Center in Abeokuta, no candidate showed up while he only saw few of them at the National Open University of Nigeria, Abeokuta Study Center, as well as the Moshood Abiola Polytechnic waiting for the exercise.
The JAMB registrar, however, directed that all the candidates who had besieged the JAMB office in the state located at Oke –Ilewo to be conveyed with buses to other CBT centres to get registered for the UTME.
He said, ‘’You are a witness, you can see that no candidates have come here for registration and they are saying that JAMB is not registering any candidate. We are appealing to them to go to other centers for their registration “.
Oloyede stated that JAMB had given permission to the other centers to conduct the registration exercise so as to avoid long queues of candidates at its offices across the country, noting every CBT centre has the capacity to register at least 100 candidates at a time.
He said, “The impression I had before leaving Abuja was that there were long queues and the arrangement that we had made was inadequate. But you can see from what we have said that we have underutilization of facilities.”
“Prior to this registration exercise, JAMB use to license CBT centres for registration, one or two centres at the cost of 10,000 each .
What we did was to cancel the fees and to give access to every center, which means every CBT centre has the capacity to register simultaneously 100 persons.”
Oloyede, however, appealed to vice chancellors, rectors and provosts of tertiary institutions to give incentives to the people conducting the registration of the candidates, UTME: JAMB kicks as candidates shun Ogun CBT centres saying that the N700 being paid by the examination body was given to the institutions in order to avoid corruption in the registration process.
“I am appealing to my colleagues, particularly the vice chancellors, the rectors and the provosts. I had spoken to them at the committee level and I am still appealing to them to give incentives to those who are registering.
“What we have done this year was that rather than encouraging corruption, whereby those who are registering are collecting money, we have insisted that the N700 we pay per candidate should go to the institutions.
But if in public institutions they know that it’s the institution that will have the N700, they will say what is in there for me.” he said.
The registrar who acknowledged that some people would create trouble in the registration exercise, however, declared that JAMB would not extend its registration date. “I do not envisage any extension.
As at now, we have registered 40 per cent of the expected candidates and today is just two weeks. We started two weeks ago and we still have two weeks to go and for me, I believe that our planning was for 50, 000 per day, when we started the first week because of lack of familiarity with the technology we are using. We have problems, but as at yesterday (Sunday), we were registering 80 ; which means we are going to cover the backlog, “ the JAMB registrar said.
