We will go tough on underage applicants – JAMB boss

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, on Friday said sanctions would be imposed on underage applicants in the ongoing 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME, registration.

Oloyede, who monitored the registration across various centres in Lagos told reporters that out of the 780,202 candidates registered so far, 11,512 were underage.

He said JAMB had given  opportunity to exceptionally brilliant underage students who are not up to 16 years to register, but it is being abused.

He said: “We will impose some other penalty on them, that it will have been better for them  to have stayed for their time, because they are going to waste their money.

“This is the second week, the tenth day of the registration and we have registered 780,202, but surprisingly 11,512 of them are underage.

“When you are expecting 30-40, you can see the deceit. 11,512 are indicated as of today, even today alone we have 443 underage and this morning we have registered 18,813 so far and out of the 18,813, 443 of them are underage”

He said the registration has been seamless and there were no plans for extension.

“It [extension] can never happen, because there is no problem, students are registering, and we are registering daily, more than what we had budgeted to, we had planned for,  we are surpassing the target, so for me, these students are going to universities.

“This is the first time that I will be registering 80,000 plus, yesterday we registered close to 100,000 across the country, so we budgeted for 60,000 per day,  that’s what we use in our planning, but from the third day, we started 80,000, 90,000 per day, so which means we will finish long before the time.

“Now we have 782,000 plus, out of about 2 million we are expecting, and we are not up to the 14th day, it is on Monday that will be our 14th day, so two weeks will be on Monday, so we still have  Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, before you can say we are two weeks into our five weeks, and by that time we will be over 1 million, so what else do we expect, it has been smooth,” he said.