No fewer than 1.6 million candidates have been registered for the 2023 Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) at the close of registration.

The Registrar of the Board, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this at the end of a joint monitoring exercise with the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr David Adejo, in Abuja on Monday.

Mr Oloyede, however, disclosed that in the cause of registration 15 culprits were discovered to be defrauding the process, adding that the culprits have been apprehended and were currently detained.

He also disclosed that registration for direct entry candidates commenced this Monday.

According to him, “So far we have registered about 1.6 million candidates because we do not expect more than that, and that is because the direct entry starts today.

“We have the challenge of the normal people who want to defraud the process as we have been monitoring what has been happening.

“We are ahead of them even when they think they are clever.” 

The Permanent Secretary in his remarks, said there was need to extend the registration to give others challenged by the naira redesign policy an opportunity to register.

“This is especially because registration process is dependent on bank operations and we’ve not have the top level of bank operations in the last two to three weeks for understandable reasons,” he said.

Mr Asejo noted that before the extension of registration for one week, JAMB had actually registered about 98 per cent candidates, saying that no one would be left behind in its registration process.

The exercise took place at one of the Computer Based Center (CBT), the Global Distance Learning Institute. 

(NAN)