The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has a message for parents and candidates who believe a qualified applicant has been unfairly denied admission: stop seeking backdoor solutions and start using the official channels the system has built for exactly this purpose.
Professor Ishaq Oloyede made the call during an appearance on Good Morning Nigeria on the Nigerian Television Authority, urging candidates with strong UTME scores who are not admitted to their desired institutions to formally protest to JAMB rather than resorting to the kind of illegal interventions that he said many families still pursue out of habit rather than necessity.
“If you are sure of yourself, you have a score, and you know that you ought to be admitted, and you are not admitted, protest to us because CAPS has made everything easy,” Oloyede said, referring to the Central Admission Processing System that he described as having operated without any reported problems since its introduction in 2017.
The Registrar described a pattern he said he encounters regularly, in which parents contact him seeking help for children with legitimate scores, convinced that influence is the only path to admission. “I tell them I will do nothing, and the candidate is admitted, and they thank me. I did nothing,” he said, adding that many families have simply never tested the transparent route because their default assumption is that the system is rigged.
On direct entry fraud, Oloyede said verification measures have significantly reduced forgery across JUPEB, IJMB, and related programmes. “Since 2023, annually, the rates have gone down. Many people are no longer applying for direct entry because they know we are supervising thoroughly,” he said, noting that 77 cases had been caught in the current cycle. He added that degrees submitted for admission purposes are now being verified directly with awarding institutions, including foreign universities, with four or five foreign Institutions this year already reporting that the degrees presented to JAMB did not belong to the applicants who submitted them.
For candidates preparing for the 2026 UTME, the Registrar’s remarks carry a practical instruction: earn a competitive score, submit your application correctly, and trust the process. The system, he insists, no longer requires anything else.
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