No fewer than 1.6 million candidates have been registered by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) for its 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) at the close of the registration.

The JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this at the end of a joint monitoring exercise with the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo, in Abuja on Monday.

Oloyede, however, disclosed that in the cause of registration, 15 culprits were discovered to be defrauding the process, adding that the culprits have been apprehended and were currently detained.

He also disclosed that registration for direct entry candidates commenced on Monday.

READ ALSO: JAMB extends 2023 UTME registration to February 22

The JAMB boss said: “So far we have registered about 1.6 million candidates because we do not expect more than that, and that is because the direct entry starts today.

“We have the challenge of the normal people who want to defraud the process as we have been monitoring what has been happening.

“We are ahead of them even when they think they are clever.”

On his part, the Permanent Secretary said there was a need to extend the registration to give others faced with the challenge of naira redesigning opportunity to register.

“This is especially because registration process is dependent on bank operations and we’ve not had the top level of bank operations in the last two to three weeks for understandable reasons,” Adejo said.

He stated that before the extension of registration for one week, JAMB had registered about 98 per cent candidates, saying no one would be left behind in its registration process.

The Star