Many admission seekers into tertiary institutions, who want to sit for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) being conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), are finding it difficult to register for the examination.
The registration has been ongoing since Saturday, February 19 and is expected to last till March 26 as scheduled by JAMB.
But many applicants have expressed great displeasure over the exercise, saying the process is full of hitches and frustrations.
They said if the situation was not addressed on time, many prospective candidates would certainly be denied the opportunity to sit the exam this year, except JAMB extends the deadline.
Students and their parents, who spoke to Nigerian Tribune in Lagos, identified some of the problems trailing the exercise to include profile code generation through the candidate’s National Identity Number (NIN), poor internet network, and disorderliness at the CBT registration centres, among others.
Some of them said they had been trying to generate the profile code for up to three days or more, all to no avail and due to that, they lost some amount of money as service charges to their phone operators who deducted N50 (instead of the actual N4 charge) on each SMS text.
UTME is a conditional assessment test to gain admission into tertiary institutions from colleges of education to universities in Nigeria. The examination coordinating body, JAMB, has made the generation of a profile code a first step and mandatory for every prospective candidate to be able to progress with the registration by logging into the JAMB portal to fill the application forms, make payment and then do the biometric capturing.
Due to the inability to generate the code after many attempts via the Short Text Message (SMS) and using different active phone numbers, some candidates do go for the alternative, which is to send an email with the candidate’s NIN and name to an address given as nimc-jamb2022@nimc.gov.ng.
“This other method is also problematic before we could sail through on the third of attempt,” Mr Remi Adelowo, one of the troubled parents and father of three, told Nigerian Tribune.
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According to him, at some initial attempts, we got automated responses to the email, asking for a retrial after four hours if the code was not sent and we did that for two days, but on the second day there was no response again, so we kept trying the other day.
“But at last, we had to go back to the first option, by using my wife’s phone number if we could be lucky and that was how we were able to generate the code and then proceeded to a CBT centre around the Iyana-Ipaja axis.
Mr Adelowo, a civil servant said at the CBT centre and with e-Pin, they went through another terrible experience as there was total disorderliness of operations including non-adherence to COVID -19 protocols at the place.
“Just Friday last week, I was there around 8.00am with my daughter and they didn’t attend to her until around 2.00pm and doing the biometric capturing also turned out to be another big issue.
“They told her there was no internet network and that she should step aside pending the time the network would start functioning again and because of that, we waited for another three hours still without the network functioning. We had to leave with the hope of coming back the next day.
“On the next day, which was Saturday, we arrived at the centre as early as 7.30am and my daughter was the second person to come around. We were happy thinking they would be attended to as they arrived but that wasn’t so.
“The CBT people tried to play pranks on us again by first attending to a group of students, claiming they were also around the previous day but were not attended to.
“I had to protest the practice openly before they reluctantly attended to my daughter around 11.00am. “The process is too traumatic,” Mr Adelowo lamented
However, Adelowo, just like many others, put the blames of the poor registration process first on National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) for its poor internet connectivity to JAMB’s server and on the CBT centres that are not orderly in their operations and then on JAMB for not doing effective monitoring of the exercise at the CBT centres.
Reacting to the complaints, registrar of JAMB, Professor Is-haq Oloyede said the applicants are to be fully blamed for all the problems being encountered during the course of registration and therefore their problems are self-inflicted.
He identified lack of obeying simple instructions and guidelines such as carefree and wrong imputation of NIN by applicants, poor coordination with their family members and failure to follow other stipulated rules as the sole factors inhibiting the smooth registration.
He said JAMB as a body had come up with a system designed to be hitch-free but for only applicants who follow the laid down guidelines.
He said as far as JAMB is concerned and based on his personal monitoring of the exercise, the registration is on course including the hope of meeting a target of about 1.5 million applicants by the deadline.
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