By Abiola Olawale
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has on Tuesday said it will spend over N100 million on the prosecution of the 400 individuals who were allegedly involved in impersonation during the concluded 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
During the course of the 2020 UTME examination, over 400 people were caught trying to write the exam for other different individuals who registered with JAMB.
The Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, made this announcement on Tuesday during a press conference in Abuja.
He said over 400 candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria had been tracked for admission fraud, and that the examination board is now ready to spend up to N100m to prosecute 200 offenders, which will serve as a deterrence to people who want to engage in impersonation in future.
In his words, “This year we have over 400 people that have already been caught, who those that wrote the exam are different from those who are registering (in Universities). We have put certain things in place and we are expecting each of the institutions to come forward. In Nigeria, people don’t copy good things but the bad things. The cases of exam malpractices which used to be in the South has now crept to the North and the first 20 of such cases we tracked came mostly from the North, especially Kano. This year, we had over 400 people that were caught whereby those who wrote the exams were different from those who applied. About 200 of the candidates would be prosecuted, five from each state of the federation, as JAMB does not have the resources to prosecute all the 400 candidates. Prosecuting a candidate would cost the board over N500,000.”
Similarly, the examination board paraded two persons who were alleged to have engaged in examination impersonation.
According to Oloyede, one Buhari Abubakar was caught while attempting to impersonate one Muhammad Sanusi, in the 2020 UTME examination. “Both suspects were arrested by the Civil Defence Corps in Kano. Their arrangements ran into hitches when all the candidate’s details, including his identity card, carried the passport of the hired examination-impersonator.” Oloyede said.
