By ABDULGAFAR ALABELEWE, Kaduna

Kaduna State Chapter of the apex students union in the country, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) has raised concern that thousands of candidates may be disenfranchised from taking part in this year’s Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination due to hitches in their NIN/Profile code.

NANS Chairman in Kaduna State, Huzaifa Bello in a statement disagreed with the JAMB on reasons it gave, hence, called for reasonable extension of electronic registration instead of risking students’ lives to travel to JAMB headquarters in their respective states capital for manual registration.

According to him, JAMB had shut out thousands of candidates who were unable to obtain profile codes before May 27 from registering online for this year’s examinations. As a result, we have been inundated with calls and all manner of correspondences by students, parents and other concerned persons who have expressed their dissatisfaction and bitterness at this decision taken by the Board.

“Obtaining a profile code is mandatory for all prospective JAMB candidates. This year’s procedure has been plagued with numerous challenges due to the requirement that candidates have to link their phone numbers with their National Identity Number (NIN).

“These challenges have already caused a shift in the closing date for registration from May 15 to May 29 and a shift in the examination dates as well. But even with the latest two weeks extension granted by JAMB yesterday (Monday), thousands of candidates are still out there without the mandatory profile code.

“From available statistics the board has only registered about 1.3 million candidates as compared to over two million it did last year and this figure represents the lowest turnout for the exams in decades.

“The low enrollment figures are directly attributed to the NIN requirement and the difficulty in obtaining the “almighty” profile code which cost N50 per trial and could cost a candidate a couple of hundreds or some thousands of Naira before receiving the codes on their mobile phones,” he said.

Bello argued that, “If the candidates could not obtain profile codes due to hitches on JAMB’s servers, within the previous two weeks extension, we feel the new two weeks extension is too short a period to address the hitches. We therefore call on the Examination body to further extend the closing date for another two weeks, making one month to allow all intending candidates register.” (The Nation)

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