The Registrar of the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board, Ishaq Oloyede, Thursday, expressed concern over the way many Nigerians blamed the organisation for the 912,013 illegal admissions processed by tertiary institutions in the country.
He, however, said JAMB would not hesitate to prove its innocence and expose the persons behind the nearly one million illegal admissions into tertiary schools between 2017 and 2020.
This is as the Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps, Brig Gen. Mohammed Fadah, vowed that he would block further attempts by institutions to present unqualified persons for the National Youth Service Corps.
The JAMB Registrar and Fadah stated these at the opening ceremony of the 2022 Batch ‘C’ pre-mobilisation workshop of the NYSC in Abuja, with the theme, “Stemming fraudulent enlistment in the mobilisation process: Time for drastic action to arrest the menace.”
Oloyede said, “All problems related to mobilisation, either rightly or wrongly, are put at the doorstep of JAMB. We are ready to accept but we won’t hesitate to prove our innocence. We will be proving our innocence by exposing those who are actually culpable.
“We have over 900 institutions that are producing admission candidates with JAMB, but we have continued to take measures in conjunction with the NYSC to make sure that the fake ones among those who are being mobilised are demobilised.
“One of the steps we have taken is to introduce the Central Admissions Processing System, which accommodates all the genuine cases and exposes all the bad ones.
“CAPS has shown clearly that those who are bad have nowhere to hide and will continue to be exposed.
‘’We started CAPS in 2017, and some people thought it was a joke, but we have come out with the list of people who have been illegally admitted between 2017 and 2020.
“As of today, on their own, tertiary institutions who initially denied any culpability, have confessed they gave illegal admission to close to one million candidates between 2017 and 2021.
“Last year, the Minister of Education, Alhaji Adamu Adamu, eventually granted amnesty and directed that we should try to rescue close to one million candidates that had been illegally admitted.
“If you take into consideration that the country admits about 600,000 candidates into tertiary institutions each year, you will realise that close to one million illegal candidates is enough to destabilise the system.”
Consequently, he called on institutions to make sure that they followed the rules.
Oloyede said there were different shades of malpractices in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted by JAMB.
“If you’re talking about cheating in the exam hall and trying to change marks, go to southern Nigeria. However, if you’re talking about manipulating the registration process before the exams, go to northern Nigeria,” he said.
Other issues identified by the JAMB Registrar bedevilling the system included students trying to compromise staff for mobilisation; fraudsters defrauding candidates with fake admissions; delay by institutions in processing genuine admissions and the delegation of authorities by institutions to less qualified persons who are compromising their integrity.
The NYSC chief expressed concern about the declining quality of graduates being presented for mobilisation.
He said, “During the 2022 Batch ‘B’ Streams I and II orientation programmes, our field officers detected a good number of prospective corps members, especially those claiming to be foreign-trained, with shocking inability to defend their supposed educational qualifications.
“Series of confessions were extracted from them, and these will hopefully assist us in carrying out further investigations.”
Earlier, the NYSC Director (Corps Mobilisation), Victoria Ango, explained that part of the efforts to contain the menace of fraudulent mobilisation informed the choice of the theme of the workshop.