By Uji Abdullahi Iliyasu
Abuja
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said the board had paid over N600 million to CBT centres involved in the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). This is a part of JAMB’s promise to remit to the CBT centres, the service charges it
would collect on their behalf alongside the N3,500 UTME/DE registration fees.
In a statement made available to Blueprint Monday, JAMB’s Head of Publicity and Protocol Dr Fabian Benjamin said, “The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has since remitted over N600m service charges to respective centres in line with the cashless policy of the Board, which represents the total number of candidates registered multiplied by N700.”
He however said that the CBT centres owned by JAMB were, excluded from the payment.
“It will be recalled that N104, 894,300.00 was paid in the first week of the registration; N251,730,500.00 in the second week, and N332,150,700.00 was paid for last week’s registration.
Cumulatively, over N600m has been paid to CBT centres as centre charges.”
Dr Benjamin said the policy, apart from reducing radically the sharp practices associated with warehousing candidates by tying them to non-performing centres, had also helped the proprietors of CBT centres to have a global picture of the total amount being generated by their respective centres.
JAMB had earlier introduced the cashless policy to curb the excesses of some fraudulent CBT centres that usually take advantage of the hapless candidates. Following this, Therefore, the Board had banned the use of cash and directed all candidates to pay the service charges to the e-PIN vendors alongside the N3,500 application fees which the Board remitted to the centres on a weekly basis proportional to the number of candidates they register.
“At the inception of this policy, many had feared that the usual government bureaucracy would get in the way of the centres getting their rightful dues. However, the Board had not only surpassed all expectations but had also proved that with the right leadership, bureaucratic bottlenecks have no place in administration processes.”
Meanwhile, JAMB management said the board will not extend the ongoing 2022 UTME/DE registration scheduled to end on March 26, 2022, because the time scheduled for the registration from February 19 to March 26, 2022, is the only window allotted to it by relevant authorities for the conduct of the exercise.
Dr Benjamin who disclosed this added that UTME registration dates are not fixed arbitrarily but through a consensus of opinions of the Federal Ministry of Education and examination agencies. Hence, before the commencement of registration or examination for any given year, all public examinations bodies are invited to a roundtable where they are expected to agree on the timetable of activities for each examination agency and which must be strictly adhered to,” Benjamin said.
He therefore, said extension would interfere with sister examination bodies such as WAEC, NECO and NABTEB.
“JAMB would not like to usurp their allotted times.”
