The registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Professor Is’haq Oloyede has said that there is panic buying by UTME candidates and encouraged by parents, there is extortion of candidates by unscrupulous elements.
The action, he said, is worse than the extortion itself.
Oloyede made this statement during an interactive session with officers and men of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps Tuesday in their headquarters in Abuja.
The registrar lamented that the federal government had sliced the price of UTME registration from N5000 to N3500 to reduce the burden on parents, but some unscrupulous elements in the registration process were devising dubious means to extort the candidates and their parents.
“In order to do this, these people purposely created bottleneck to create panic in candidates in order to extort them with ease,” he said.
He said when JAMB noticed that banks could not handle the sales of the UTME conveniently; it expanded the process to include bank outlets to ease concentration in banks. However some elements still penetrated the groups.
He said, to put off the eyes of money outlets from candidates money, JAMB gives N210 as commission to all sale outlets for each form sold.
“The extortion of candidates is ongoing all over the centres across Nigeria. For this, we are asking you (Nigeria Security and civil Defence Corps, NSCDC) to assist JAMB in arresting the situation.
“If a candidate is charged higher than the prescribed price, such candidate should go to the commandant of NSCD of the state concerned and make his complaints known.
“Every JAMB agent, but original and sub-agents, have national identification number (NIN) to prevent enemies of the state from using them.”
Speaking further, Oloyede said tutorial centres were immersed in examination malpractices. He said some of the so-called coaching centres are owned by school certificate holders who are only out for making huge profits from extorting candidates and parents. He asked NSCD to focus attention on tutorial centres which, he says, have become training grounds for examination malpractice.
