UTME: JAMB averts crisis in Abuja, pacifies angry candidates

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Wednesday confirmed the registration of 871,576 candidates so far for the 2017 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The Registrar and Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, said this in an interview with journalists on Wednesday evening after inspecting some registration centres in Abuja, where he also ruled out extension of the registration process, despite the challenges faced by candidates nationwide.
He also promised to comply if invited and summoned by the House of Representatives, to clarify what has been responsible for the challenges of registration being experienced by candidates.
“If I am invited, who am I not to answer them? I will honour their invitation because they are our employers”,
Before his intervention, Oloyede had earlier threatened to revoke the license of Digital Bridge Institute, a parastatal under the National Communications Commission (NCC), for not complying with JAMB registration rules.
According to him, the DBI was on wireless system which made registration to be very slow.
He said the centre was supposed to register 100 candidates at a time but could only take 20, while other centres visited were not having any problem registering candidates.
To appease the over 150 angry candidates clustering the centre gate, Oloyede quickly arranged for them, especially the males, to be moved to other centres where there was less pressure.
However, the management of DBI attributed the delay to poor net work, saying that the router could only take 20 candidates at a time
According to him, the target of the organisation was to register 1.4 million candidates for the UTME in 2017.
Oloyede added that no candidate would be left out of the registration process despite having a week before the end of the exercise.
He said, “About 871, 576 candidates have been registered as at today (Wednesday evening). We are going to 1, 467, 000 candidates. What remains is 595,647 and we still have a whole week.
“No candidate will be left unattended to at the closing of this exercise. You do not want me to extend just for the sake of extension because I monitor on my screen. That is why there is a difference between the closing date for registration and the closing date for sale. By the time we sell, we will know how many that have bought but have not registered.”
The JAMB Registrar also said arrangements would be made for physically challenged candidates to write the examination.