The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has said that the introduction of National Identification Number (NIN) as a prerequisite for registration for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination has put hired examination takers out of business.
The Board accordingly faulted a report in a national daily, not Nigerian Tribune, suggesting that JAMB has blamed the recruitment of NIN as responsible for a drop in revenue to N5.8 billion.
Spokesperson of JAMB, Dr Fabian Benjamin, while reacting to the purported report in a statement on Wednesday in Abuja, said the Board in the first place is not a revenue-generating agency and would not have been happy with fake a ballooning that register for UTME every year.
Recall that more than 1.3 million candidates registered for the 2021 UTME as against the 1.9 million that registered for the same examination in 2020.
But Benjamin said it was necessary for this erroneous impression to be corrected so as not to mislead the public.
“First, it is an error of fact to denigrate the wonderful contribution of the National Identification Number (NIN) to the UTME registration process by insinuating that it had a deleterious effect on the financial base of the Board when, in actual fact, we are not a revenue generation agency nor purported to be one.
“On the contrary, the Board greatly appreciates the partnership with NIMC which has led to the inadvertent benefit of revealing the actual number of candidates registered annually.
“In essence, I had reiterated that the import of the partnership with NIMC which mandated the use of NIN in the registration process, was that the facility has made it virtually impossible for hired examination takers to register multiple times as they used to do to perpetuate their nefarious activities,” Benjamin said.
He maintained that the Board was pleased to be vindicated in its belief all along that the huge number of candidates applying for UTME every year could not be realistic especially when seen against the backdrop of West African Examination Council (WAEC) candidates which is always around the figure recorded by the Board this year.
According to him, the Board was actually pleased to note that the series of measures it had put in place to ascertain the veracity of its position that the true candidates’ strength should be about 1.5 million had yielded the desired results.
He said: “For instance, it had given several opportunities to ‘latecomer candidates’ by way of several extensions to ensure that they were registered. In fact, the rationale for continuous harvesting of candidates with alleged challenges was informed by the need to create opportunities and flexibilities by the Board in its bid to establish the true figure of its candidates’ population going forward, of course, with the natural increase in population factored in and haven harvested all even with those without NIN yet the number still remained the same.
“Consequently, it is the Board’s firm belief that the introduction of NIN has helped in addressing one of the fundamental channels of perpetrating examination malpractice by way of multiple applications, among others.
“It is also worth reiterating that the Board is not a revenue generation entity and, as such, is not interested in the ever-ballooning number of candidates but rather it is concerned with how to address those loopholes being used by fraudsters to distort national data in their bid to compromise public examinations.
“As far as the Board is concerned, having a realistic number of candidates sitting its examination is a major achievement which only the partnership with NMC has made possible. Therefore, the Board affirms its resolve not to ever compromise on the integrity of its processes on account of generating fat operating surpluses,” Benjamin said.
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