The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said it is targeting at least 1.5million candidates to sit for the examination which comes up later in the year.
This is following the opening of application portal for the 2022 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME, over 500,000 candidates are believed to have successfully registered nationwide.
The Board made the disclosure on Thursday in Abuja.
Registrar of JAMB, Professor Is-haq Oloyede, who led a team of officials of the Board to monitor the registration exercise in some Computer Based Test (CBT) Centres in Abuja.
He noted that in many registration centres across the country, the exercise has been going on smoothly except little glitches with the system, especially network problem in some places, saying however that this year’s registration process was an improvement over the previous ones, having put into consideration some of the challenges and complaints of candidates in the past.
According to Oloyede: “So far so good, we have registered about 500,000 candidates. We are expecting about 1.5 million candidates or there about. We still have more than 12 days to go.
“If things continue to go smoothly, we planned to register 50,000 per day, the day before yesterday, it was over 70,000 per day, we believe today we should be able to register 70,000. Yesterday, there was a little glitch on the system,” he said.
Oloyede took time during the monitoring exercise to interrogate prospective candidates who could not proceed with registration because of challenges in generating code from the National Identify Management Commission (NIMC), among other issues.
“But you have seen what is happening now, that is why I’m happy that you are here and able to talk to candidates who have problems. You saw that 99% of the problems are self-inflicted and it is because they play into the hands of fraudsters,” he said.
He was particularly worried about a young man who claimed upon interrogation at the Kogo CBT Centre, Bwarri, that he was a “do-gooder” but was doing wrong thing on the profile of the prospective candidates.
He appealed to non-candidates to keep off the exercise while also calling on the parents to allow their children to read the instructions and follow them, insisting that most the problems faced by candidates are self-made.
The Registrar, however, disclosed that four vendors who were found wanting are currently being interrogated by the appropriate office, vowing to blacklist their agents if the Board is convinced of their involvement in underhand dealings.
