FIFTEEN persons have been arrested in connection with various forms of irregularities in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, which revealed this yesterday, also said 1.6 million candidates registered to sit for its 2023 UTME.
JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, who disclosed this at the end of a joint monitoring exercise with the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr David Adejo, in Abuja, said the 15 persons were discovered to be defrauding the process, adding that the culprits had been apprehended and were detained.
He also disclosed that registration for direct entry candidates commenced yesterday, saying
“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. We are ahead of them even when they think they are clever.”
Also speaking, the Permanent Secretary said there was need to extend the registration to give others faced with the challenge of naira redesign opportunity to register.
“This is especially because 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,” Adejo said.
According to him, before the extension of registration for one week, JAMB had registered about 98 per cent candidates.
