The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, (JAMB), Ishaq Oloyede has said the board has discovered that some highly placed politicans in Nigeria did not sit for the matriculation examination by themselves.
The Registrar said this on Friday while speaking at the 23rd annual seminar of the Nigerian Academy of Education. He said the outcome of its probe into examination fraud between 2009 and 2019 will shock many Nigerians.
Oloyede said although the board may not be able to punish the culprits because they have already left the system, it would go ahead to publish their names in order to shame them. He also said the board has hired a Senior Advocate of Nigeria to conduct the prosecution of more than 100 persons caught in various malpractices during the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), which held between April 11 and 18, and who were arrested by security operatives across the country.
The registrar did not name the SAN leading the prosecution of the errant UTME candidates and professional examination fraudsters. He also did not state the day the 2019 UTME results would be released. Oloyede said the board was amused by the insinuation that its server had crashed. Such comments, he said, were amusing to members of the board.
“If I were to be punishing every staff of JAMB that is committing infractions, I will not focus on the assignment. I will be going from one disciplinary committee to the other and my attention will be diverted. And that is why I go for the shortest route: once you are caught to have committed one infraction, you will not be assigned with examination duties again. It is a privilege, which I can withdraw.“If you are that bad that I don’t want to see your face around me, I will transfer you to another place. If we have to take disciplinary action against all of them, look at it, today, we have not less than 100 people in police cells across the country who were caught for examination malpractices.“I have appointed a Senior Advocate of Nigeria who is a former Solicitor-General to help me oversee all these so that the suspects can be brought to book. And my Director of Legal asked me, what offences should we charge these people for; for multiple registration? And I said, why can’t we go to the Examination Malpractice Act?“So, my problem has started with having to draft the charges, despite the fact that we have evidence against them. That is the beginning of the problem. I will now ask to be paying my staff to travel out of Abuja to be testifying in court as they are adjourning month after month the cases, and we will be wasting money and time on transport” the registrar said.
