Father Arrested For Impersonating Son During UTME

According to the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), a candidate’s father was detained for pretending to be his son during the current Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

While speaking to journalists shortly after the inspection at Kaduna State University (KASU) CBT Centre, the JAMB Registrar said: “For those who engage in cheating, they should know that it does not pay. The technology is helping to check that. Across the country, most of the problem we have is impersonation. For instance, now, we say we have NIN, we now have cases of people with two NINs and therefore, that has defeated the purpose of identity verification. We are going to take that up with NIMC, that there are people who have two NINs.

“We have a case of a father impersonating his son, writing an examination for the son and I wonder, are you not destroying your son’s future? Of course, two of them are now in custody. I can’t understand what the father will now tell his son when they are both locked up in the same cell. This happened not in Kaduna, but I don’t want to disclose the state.

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“So, it is largely cases of impersonation, but we are ahead of them; we are just picking them up like chicken now because the facilities are there for us to see what they are doing and to pick them up. And even those that we have left for research purposes, they will see what will happen after the exams,” he said.

Using the occasion, the JAMB Registrar also advised those who had missed the exam due to circumstances unrelated to the examination body to forget about it, stating that JAMB was unable to allocate tens of millions of national money to reschedule a session for the small number of candidates who had missed the exam due to their own carelessness.

He issued a warning, saying that as the UTME is not a school-based test, JAMB would not be held accountable for any failure experienced by applicants who registered through their secondary schools and were unable to complete the prerequisites either on purpose or as a result of logistical difficulties.

“Most of those candidates who missed the UTME are students from hostels who were made to register through schools because of the money the schools want to collect from the parents in the name of JAMB, which would now put 30 students in one bus. They will now be dropping them in different locations. By the time they get to the last student’s centre, he is already late for the exam. You will now see the principal writing to me. What business do I have with a school?

“Even a religious body wrote to me that, oh, the following 100 candidates, I want them to write their exams on a particular day of the examination. They were even deciding for me the school to post the candidates. How is that possible? I will ask the candidates, why did you submit your registration number to a third party that is writing to me, when the person is not a candidate. And you know as a candidate that you have a right to write to JAMB directly. But, they allow the third party who will lie on their behalf to contact JAMB,” he said.

A Gentle Reminder: Every obstacle is a stepping stone, every morning; a chance to go again, and those little steps take you closer to your dream.

Nnamdi Okoli