By Mumini Abdulkareem
The Registrar of the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede has revealed that 740 centres have so far been approved for registration of students for the 2019 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME).
Oloyede said this while speaking on Saturday with journalists shortly after embarking on unscheduled visits so some CBT centres in Ilorin.
He said such visits will be replicated in other centres across the country in the days ahead.
At Africa Broadband, one of the private registration centres situated at Tanke, Oloyede, who ensured that connectivity issues and failure to connect with the help lines provided were rectified, said it was good that the place visited has few connectivity issues which will afford the commission the opportunity to provide seamless exercise.
He also visited the centre at the JAMB office, Ilorin where he was told that they have successfully registered all the candidates that turned up.
On complaints arising from registration procedures, the JAMB registrar urged all stakeholders to pay attention to the numerous publications of the commission on several national dailies and blamed the parents for trying to do registration for their wards because they don’t want to release their ATM pins to them.
“We are doing our best and will continue to improve on our system. We started registration on Wednesday and while the admission for the ongoing session is being concluded, we have also initiated the process of admitting candidates for the next session.
“I have carried out unscheduled visit to a number of centres since we started and will continue with that because we are transparent about it, we want people to see what we are doing, to appreciate us and be corrected if we go wrong. Such unscheduled visits will give us on the spot assessment of what is happening so that nobody will do a sort of window dressing.
“As at Friday, we have about 740 CBT centres accredited across the nation. My impression is that the system is working very well. Among the places visited, there is only one place where they had problem and that had been escalated to the appropriate authority.
On the ongoing ASUU strike, he appealed to ‘all parties involved not to make the students the guinea pig.
“That had been my own policy and remained so. We can afford to disagree and agree later but we should not allow that to disrupt the system. We are destroying the system by these incessant and unreasonable strikes”, he added.
