JAMB Denies Increment Of UTME Fees

By Oduyemi Odumade

Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, has denied that the examination body in Registrar creased the fees for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for 2024.

Prof Oloyede who said this when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Basic Education at the National Assembly Complex explained that the extra money being paid by candidates was a charge by operators of Computer Based Test (CBT) centres to assuage the high cost of diesel.

He said JAMB only facilitated the process of collecting the payments so that candidates would not be exploited by the operators.

The JAMB Registrar also knocked some universities for overshooting the number of students approved to be admitted for a session.

He promised to turn over the names of such institutions to the House Committee for further legislative action.

The Registrar also said the examination body was working to recover N4.2 billion owed by Zenith Bank over previous transactions.

According to him, the matter is being investigated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC).

“For the CBT centres, I also feel their pain because we also have about 45 of them owned by JAMB directly. We know what they are going through”.

“The money is not paid by JAMB but the students themselves. You know N700 for registration and N700 for examination but given the cost of diesel this year, we only allowed them, not that we are paying them because we are collecting from the students and passing to the centres”.

“This year we are going to allow them to charge as much as N1500 for UTME because of cost of diesel.

“But you can see the press in the past one week said that JAMB has increased the cost. What we have done is to allow the CBT centres to charge more than they are charging. But because we are going to collect it for them, why are we collecting it is because if we leave them alone they will extort the students and they will be collecting N4000 or N5000. That is why we said pay to us and we would transfer it to you weekly.

“We have raised it from N700 to N1500 effective from 2024 so as to allow them to recoup. We have not increased JAMB fee. We only allowed this people to charge a better fee by adding to what they are charging but all the newspapers had reported it that we have increased the charges”.

Chairman of the Committee, Oboku Ofoji, urged the Board to reconcile its financial records with the office of the Accountant General of the Federation.

He said the interface with the examination body was not a witch-hunt but an effort to improve the education sector.

“I want to also clear one wrong impression that it is a witch-hunt. This job is about our country and the educational sector, so for us to interface with you and you see all the national television here, to me I was thinking that JAMB would appreciate this conversation openly. It goes a long way to inform Nigerians how prepared JAMB is. We all owe Nigerians explanations about our stewardship,” he said.

Edited By Grace Namiji