JAMB registers 1.6m candidates for 2023 UTME, arrests 15

Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB)has disclosed that no fewer than 1.6 million candidates have been registered for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME).

Its Registrar, 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 on Monday.

Oloyede, however, disclosed that during the registration exercise, 15 culprits were discovered to be defrauding the process, adding that the culprits have been apprehended and were currently detained.

He also disclosed that registration for direct entry candidates commenced this Monday.

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.

“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 that there was a need to extend the registration period to give others faced with the challenge of naira redesigning the opportunity to register.

“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 per cent of candidates, adding that 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.