JAMB to prosecute 200 exam cheats, worries over rising fraud

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) says it will spend about N100m on the prosecution of 200 persons involved in impersonation in the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.

It alleged that some tertiary institutions were accomplices in the widespread irregularities, adding that examination scam syndicates in the Computer-Based Test centres, which used to be in the southern part of Nigeria, had now crept into the North.

The Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, stated these during a press conference in Abuja.

He said over 400 candidates seeking admission into tertiary institutions in Nigeria had been tracked for admission fraud.

JAMB also paraded one Buhari Abubakar, who was reportedly caught in an attempt to impersonate one Muhammad Sanusi, his alleged accomplice, in an examination malpractice.

Both suspects, from Kano State, were arrested by men of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps.

Oloyede said, “In Nigeria, people don’t copy good things but the bad things. The cases of exam malpractices which used to be in the South has now crept to the North and the first 20 of such cases we tracked came mostly from the North, especially Kano.

“This year, we had over 400 people that were caught whereby those who wrote the exams were different from those who applied. About 200 of the candidates would be prosecuted, five from each state of the federation, as JAMB does not have the resources to prosecute all the 400 candidates. Prosecuting a candidate would cost the board over N500,000.”

Abubakar, a candidate of the 2020 UTME, Oloyede said, paid Sanusi N25,000 to source for an examination taker to sit the exam for him, on the basis of which he secured admission into Bayero University, Kano, to read Islamic Studies.

Oloyede said, “The arrangement ran into hitches when all the candidate’s details, including his identity card, carried the passport of the hired examination-impersonator.”