Regina Otokpa, ABUJA 
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed plans to clear the backlog of illegal admissions conducted by tertiary education institutions in the country.
Recently, the examination body uncovered 706,189 illegal admissions by universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, and other related institutions.
Registrar of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, who made the disclosure after receiving the Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ECAN’s) Award of Excellence at the weekend in Abuja, said the move was to rescue students who have the requisite qualifications but were admitted illegally.
He said: “The issue of illegal admission that we want to put a halt to, we want to clear the backlog and ensure that those of them who have been improperly admitted but have the minimum qualification are rescued. “We want to continue the campaign to discourage those who are committing such illegal action to stop doing such.”
On the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), Oloyede said the Board has decided to adopt a cashless system in the registration process, adding that JAMB would also prohibit Computer Based Test (CBT) centres from selling e-PINs to guard against extortion of candidates.
“On our campaign on cashless CBT centres, particularly during our registration exercise, it is known that many CBT centres, despite the supervision, still manage to exploit candidates.
“We want to put a stop to to that, we have intensified monitoring but part of what we are doing is to ensure we protect the students against this extortion. With this, anybody who collects money from the centre would have been seen to have done a wrong thing because you are not supposed to collect any money.
“We are also going to ensure that ePIN is not something that they will be selling at the CBT centres. We will ensure that anybody who wants to sell ePIN will not be a CBT centre, once you are a CBT centre, you have lost the right to sell ePIN so that we can hold the ePIN sellers responsible for what they do.
Once you are a CBT centre, you cannot also say you want to sell ePIN,” he said..
Commending the media for its role as a representative of the people and in promotion of good governance, Oloyede called for support in the various campaigns embarked upon by the Board to ensure a better admission system.
