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Akinwande Soji-Ojo
The Registrar, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Ishaq Oloyede, has disclosed that a total of 1.6 million candidates have registered to sit for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), as sale of UTME forms ends on Wednesday, February 22, 2023.
Oloyede made the disclosure on Monday during a monitoring exercise of the registration in Abuja.
During the exercise led by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Andrew David Adajo, Oloyede said the board had apprehended about 15 people who go against conduct of the UTME registration processes.
JAMB commenced the sale of 2023 UTME form on Saturday, January 14, 2023, and was expected to close on Tuesday, February 14, 2023.
However, the Board extended the registration exercise as a result of the lingering naira crisis by one week.
Earlier, Adejo explained that the extension was necessary to ensure all the candidates have time to register.
“Ordinarily, registration for UTME has closed but to take care of people that could, for one reason or another not be able to make the deadline of February 14th, especially as you know, most of registration processes depends on banks and we could not have top level bank operations from the past three weeks for understandable reasons,” he said.
He, however, said the turnout was very low because the first set of registration that ended on February 14, had virtually captured more than 98 per cent of people.
“So, the people that are being captured now are those that are left over.
“Today (Monday), for instance we only met three people. We asked the head of this centre how many were registered on Saturday and he said about 15, so I think the monitoring gave us the confidence that yes it was a good idea to extend so we don’t leave anybody out of the box,” Adejo said.