The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed that it will spend about N100 million to prosecute 200 candidates for examination malpractices in the 2020 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

The Registrar/Chief Executive of JAMB, Prof. Ish-aq Oloyede, in a press conference in Abuja, 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 examination malpractice.

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

While alleging that some tertiary institutions were accomplices in the widespread irregularities, he said the first 64 cases of CBT infractions treated by JAMB were from the North, with some having multiple cases of up to 96 irregularities.

He 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.”

Oloyede said Abubakar, a candidate of the 2020 UTME, 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.”