The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, (JAMB) has said 24,148 candidates have gained admission into various higher institutions in Nigeria as at August 29.
The JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, also dismissed as ‘baseless’ agitations in some quarters that registration fee for Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination candidates should be reduced.
About 1,662,762 candidates wrote the 2018 UTME between March 9 and 19.
The spokesperson of the board, Fabian Benjamin, provided information on the admitted candidates in a phone interview with PREMIUM TIMES Wednesday.
Also according to the reports by Vanguard and a few other dailies, Mr Oloyede told journalists in Abuja after a computer-based promotion exam for JAMB’s staff, that the agency’s fee is one of the lowest in the world.
According to him, JAMB sold its UTME application form for N5,000 while it remitted N7.8 billion to the Federal Government at the end of the examinations.
“Why are they not asking WAEC (to reduce fee)? Why are they not asking NECO? Why are they not asking NABTEB? Why JAMB? We charge the least and you are saying reduce. The issue is because we have a means of managing the resources properly and we now have what you can call surplus and because we are open enough to return the surplus to the government, you now say we should crash the cost,” he said.
He said the exam body would only follow a directive ”from the appropriate quarters on the cost of UTME”.
“What should be the basis of crashing the cost assuming the method we are using now is no longer available and we have to use the old method,” Mr Oloyede said.
“If the government feels we should adjust, we will adjust and not as a result of unqualified, baseless requests,” Mr Oloyede said.
