JAMB Rejects ‘Blood Money’
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it lost about half a billion naira (N.5bn) to its decision on rejecting money from unqualified individuals who applied for Direct Entry (DE) registration in 2023.
Registrar of JAMB, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, who said accepting such registration is more like “blood money”, said DE entries dropped massively in 2023 as a result of measures put in place to sanitise the process.
Oloyede, made this known at the 2023 Policy Meeting on tertiary institutions’ admissions in Abuja on Saturday.
According to the JAMB boss, DE registration which hit over 160,000 in 2017, and almost maintained same pace in subsequent years, slumped to 39,894 in 2023.
He said :” But this year we thank God. Due to the measures put in place to weed the criminals among these candidates, we now have 39,894.
” To some of us, they will say JAMB is losing money, we are not looking for blood money, we want clean money. So that is nearly half a billion loss to JAMB, but we like it because we worked for it. Because we must protect the integrity of the system otherwise the certificates we issue will become worthless papers.”
Speaking further Oloyede said the JAMB has also introduced a new measure targeted at Nigerians evading Post-Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (Post-UTME), by sitting for the exam in neighbouring countries.
” Some people – the rich ones among us now send their children to Ghana to go and write our UTME in Ghana in order to avoid Post-UTME.
We have made the rule that anybody who can take our examination outside Nigeria must have stayed in that country for not less than six months prior to the taking of the examination, so that the rich ones will not be sending their children to Republic of Benin to go and take our examination,” Oloyede said.
PlatinumPost the meeting presided by the Permanent Secretary of Federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo, attracted representing of all tertiary education institutions in the country , among other stakeholders.
Recall that JAMB had on Saturday announced the National Minimum Tolerable score (cut-off marks) for admission into universities, polytechnics, colleges of education as 140, 100 and 100 respectively.
”All institution must abide by this minimum point. This means that no institution can go below the standard.
” For the 15 private universities that demanded between 120 and 130 as minimum points, note that the 140 is sacrosanct and must not be violated.
” This is because the system put in place will not recognise 139, so ensure you comply,” the JAMB boss said.
Oloyede also said that institutions must not collect more than N2,000 as screening fees from candidates for the 2023/2024 academic session.
