5th July, 2023
The Registrar of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB Professor Ishaq Oloyede, said the Board has already concluded its investigation of the forgery of the UTME result involving Anambra Student, Mmesoma Ejikeme.
Oloyede said this in a statement he issued from Windhoek, Namibia.
The JAMB Registrar said that Mmesoma is a victim scammers involved in processing and printing of fake results for students who sit for its examinations.
He, however, insisted that such scammers cannot penetrate JAMB’s system, contrary to the promise they usually make to their victims.
But he said the inflation of the UTME) result was done with the consent of the student.
“The truth is that JAMB has concluded its investigation on Mmesoma’s score falsification matter; she was not the only one caught, just that others have chosen not to go out.
“Presently, there is an industry faking results, and unfortunately, they cannot penetrate the JAMB system. The reason is that the system is foolproof and we will prove it at any time.
“It is unfortunate that parents and some of the candidates who are being fooled are not aware that they have only been fooled.
“There is internal evidence to show that the change in Mmesoma’s scores was done with her collaboration. There are certain features pertaining to her that only she knows, and unless she makes them available to somebody else, they couldn’t have increased her scores on her behalf.”
The JAMB Regitrar also said he had spoken with former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, who has been calling for investigation of the alleged fraud by Ejikeme.
Oloyede said he told the former Minister that the Anambra Student was involved in a high-level fraudulent act.
“We improved on our facilities this year, so Ejikeme and her collaborators were still living in the past. I spoke with Mrs Ezekwesili on the matter, and I told her that it was a high-level scam, a careless forgery.”
“This is because we are no longer using some of the things they used in changing those results since 2021. We used that pattern in 2021, and you saw what happened, and many of such individuals were caught as well, and they were treated accordingly,” Oloyede added.
JAMB had on Tuesday faulted the result being paraded by 19-year-old Ejikeme by releasing a result slip, which confirmed her original score in the 2023 UTME was 249 instead of 362, she had been parading.
JAMB’s spokesperson, Fabian Benjamin, in a statement on Tuesday said: “The board would like to reassure Nigerians that its system was neither tampered with nor compromised as the candidate simply falsified a copy of a result slip of a candidate named ‘Asimiyu Mariam Omobolanle,’ who sat the UTME in 2021 and scored 138.
“It is also instructive to note that the candidate, in her statement, has inadvertently revealed the rightful owner of the result she is parading when she pointed out that the QR code on the result slip showed the actual owner of the said result before she peddled a lie in an attempt to obfuscate the truth.”