2019 UTME: Why candidates have to pay N50 to check results – JAMB

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has disclosed why
it stopped paying service charge for candidates of the Unified
Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results.

In a telephone conversation with Blueprint correspondent on Wednesday,
JAMB’s Head, Media and Information, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, said UTME
candidates were abusing the board’s gesture of footing the bill of
result checking.

The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) had criticised
the board for asking candidates to pay N50 as service for the results
checking short code.

According to JAMB spokesman, NANS had done a rejoinder to the
ultimatum it earlier gave to the board to reverse the N50 fee, saying, “…That ultimatum was based on a misconception. They didn’t understand
the modus operandi of what we call the short code or USSD. The N50 is
not going to us (JAMB). It is going to the telecom service providers
of the candidates.”

“If you are conversant with the use of the USSD, you would have
discovered that ours is about the cheapest you can have around. Why is
it the cheapest? We have bargained; we ensured that the service
providers pushed the charge down so that the ordinary candidate would
not be overburdened.”

He explained further that the board had to back some amount of money
to the telecom service providers to ensure that they keep the service
fee down at N50. 

“In fact, we paid some money back to the service providers to ensure
that they take it back to N50. When we started, we began with paying
for everybody and we made a budget for that. But we discovered that
some candidates even when they had the results, they were still busy
checking.

“For example, a candidate checked for like 20 times. He got
about 290, and he kept checking and we were incurring unnecessary
bills. So, to forestall the abuse of the process of checking results,
we asked candidates to pay N50 to the service providers,” Benjamin
clarified.

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