UTME 2023: WHY JAMB CANCELLED REGISTRATION OF 817 CANDIDATES, SANCTIONED 178 CENTRES

JAMB has disclosed over its weekly bulletin reasons for cancellation of hundreds of registrations and sanctioning of centres.  Here's a statement from JAMB bulletin below. 

 The Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, disclosed this shortly after holding a series of meetings with proprietors of CBT centres involved in the infractions, the candidates and other critical stakeholders in Abuja on Wednesday, 8th February, 2023. The Registrar said the sanctions became imperative because the candidates and centres have flagrantly breached the rules of engagements and disregard extant Advisories made available to them prior to the commencement of the registration exercise, and which were also published in both print and electronic media. 

The Registrar expressed astonishment as to why the centres should contemplate compromising the Board registration process in spite of the palliative gestures and logistics that the Board had extended to CBT operators to provide succour to them. According to him, the Board was not happy with their conduct, which he described as criminal in nature and clearly orchestrated to undermine the Board's biometric verification processes during the upcoming UTME on account of the multiple fingerprints they have inputted into the system. He said the Board had cancelled the suspect registrations and order those candidates to go back and re-register on a date to be communicated to the candidates where they had hitherto registered at no cost to the Board as the identified CBT centres would bear the cost of the repeat exercise. He said the implication of this act was enormous as it gives unfettered access to candidates' information by unauthorised persons to either change or edit such information and destroy the good work of JAMB. Prof. Oloyede said having access to candidates' details is prohibited and against the Data Protection Act, which imposed 3 years imprisonment for those that run afoul of this law. According to him, the affected 178 Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres had engaged in 'fingerprint donation' whereby one of their officials would add one of their fingerprints to complete the registration process for the candidates. He said all the 817 students would be given another opportunity to re-register for the examination with the centres bearing the cost. “For students, who allowed other people to add their fingers to their registration procedure, we found that some of them were naive, because you will hear them say: 'my finger was hot, and the man added his own.' “Some of them did it deliberately for impersonation but we can't identify those who are genuine from those who are not. As such, we will cancel all the registrations and ask them to re-register." The Registrar stated that the centres involved had all confessed with no exception and they had come up with workable solutions. "We will cancel the registration of those concerned and send a message to them to go back to the same centres where they were registered.” On the recent suspension of five Vendors for selling UTME    registration ePINs above the stipulated price, the Registrar said four out of the five had been cleared. He, however, said the excess payment would be refunded by the affected CBT centres to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) for necessary action.