The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) on Wednesday said it had registered 871,576 candidates for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
JAMB Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, confirmed this to journalists after he intervened and facilitated the smooth registration of some candidates that were stranded at the Digital Bridge Institute centre in Utako, Abuja.
Oloyede facilitated the registration of over 150 candidates by moving them to other centres to continue their registration after initial threats to shut down the DBI centre.
The JAMB registrar also said the agency would not extend the registration process despite the challenges faced by candidates nationwide.
He said the target of the organisation is to register 1.4 million candidates at the end of the exercise.
Prof. Oloyede added that no candidate would be left out of the registration process despite having a week left for the exercise.
He said: “About 871, 576 candidates have been registered as at today. We are going to 1, 467, 000 candidates.
“What we have left is 595,647 and we still have a whole week.
“There will be no need for extension because you will have finished with all the candidates. Do you want to extend and be attending to goats? What we want to do is to attend to human beings. If the human beings are not there to be registered do we extend?
“You do not want me to extend just for the sake of extension because I monitor on my screen. That is why there is a difference between the closing date for registration and the closing date for sale.
“By the time we sell we will know how many that has bought but have not registered.
“At the end of the exercise no candidate will be left unattended to at the closing of this exercise.”
The JAMB registrar also said arrangements have been made for physically challenged candidates to write the examination.
“We have made sufficient provision for the disabled since last year,” he added.
