3rd July, 2023
By Kazeem Ugbodaga
Miss Ejikeme Mmesoma, the Anambra student whose UTME result the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) disowned, has broken her silence, saying the board lied.
Mmesoma had claimed she got the highest score of 362 in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), but JAMB said she was parading a fake result and that she scored 249.
The board had in a statement on Sunday said its attention had been drawn to several publications in both print and online media celebrating certain candidates for being highest scorers in the 2023 UTME.
JAMB said it was constrained to set the records straight and wished to state unequivocally that many of the results which many of these candidates were parading were fake.
It said in many instances, some of these candidates had actually obtained far lower scores than they were claiming and had used some funny software packages to manipulate their results to deceive unsuspecting members of the public.
“The most pathetic of them all is the case of Miss Ejikeme Joy Mmesoma, who claimed to have scored 362 in the 2023 UTME and was awarded a N3m scholarship by Chief (Dr.) Innocent Chukwuma.
“She was even set to be honoured by the Anambra State Government when one of its top officials put a call through to JAMB to confirm her claim, only for the Board to reveal that Miss Ejikeme Joy Mmesoma had actually scored 249 and not the 362 she claimed.
“She had manipulated her UTME result to deceive the public to fraudulently obtain scholarships and other recognitions,” JAMB said.
But Mmesoma, in a viral video said she never forged her result and that she printed out the exact result JAMB gave to her.
According to her, “My name is Ejikeme Mmesoma. I’m the owner of this result. I went to the JAMB portal to print this result and this is the result they gave me. This is my aggregate, 362. This is exactly how I printed it out from that site.
“So saying that I forged my result is what I don’t know and I am traumatised that they accused me of forging my results because I’m not capable of forging my result. This is the evidence.
“Ok, they said I forged my result, they scan the QR code on my result and it showed a Yoruba name — Omotola Afolabi who scored 138.
“The same Omotola scored 338 when it was rechecked and this evidence showed that there is a problem.”
Mmesoma said she and her principal and the secretary of education at the Anglican Girls Grammar School went to see the Commissioner of Education in his office last Friday and that her result was snapped and sent to JAMB for verification.
“They snapped it and sent to the JAMB officials, they called back and said this was a forged result, that I forged it myself and that JAMB office don’t have a record of this.
“They called the DSS over to come to our office, the DSS took us to their office and we made our statement there and they said they would contact us later, that they are going to investigate this result to know where the source came from. Instead of them to wait for the investigation to be over, they posted that I forged my result without confirming,’ she lamented.