The Registrar, Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof Ishaq Oloyede, has warned Corps Producing Institutions to stop mobilising part-time programme graduates for the compulsory one-year national service.

He gave the warning in Abuja on Tuesday while speaking at the meeting between the management of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and Registrars of Corps Producing Institutions in Nigeria.

Frowning at the increasing rate of offering fake admission to unqualified persons, he said: “some instructions, knowing full well that unqualified students did not go through the Central Admissions Processes (CAPs). They have been admitting unqualified candidates and that is what has been responsible for illegal admission.

“JAMB has to appeal to the Minister of Education when we discover that close to one million candidates have been admitted in our tertiary instructions illegally between 2017 and 2021.

“What is relevant to our discussion today is that about 25 per cent of these illegally admitted were on Sanwich programme. We noticed that they even call them Daily Part-time students, but the Institutions have gone ahead to mobilize them for NYSC on graduation. That was why we rejected the list and told them to separate them from the graduates of regular programme.

“The mobilisation of fake corps members would not have been possible without the collaboration of the Registrars. Whether in or out of office, all those responsible for illegal admission will be held responsible and prosecuted. It is important that you as Registrars should stop these madness. I want to urge you to please stop mobilising graduates from Part-time programmes for NYSC,” he warned.

In his address, the Director-General of NYSC, Major General Shuaibu Ibrahim, warned that the Scheme is more determined now than before to prosecute fake corps members found culpable.

“There are over 2000 active Corps Producing Institutions on our database out of which only 320 of them are home based. Though relatively smaller in number, the participants for this conference are grouped into North and South for separate sections to enable everybody to be part of the decision-making process.

“The purpose of this meeting is to seek ways of eliminating fraud in the mobilising process that have already been identified with a number of measures put in place towards eradicating recurrent challenges in implementation.

“In the institutions where Registrars abdicated their roles to subordinate officers, we are bound to see all forms of abuses and shortfalls. This has given rise in the mobilisation of unqualified persons for the scheme many of which have been fished out by the NYSC.

“The management is determined more than ever before to tighten the loopholes and commence the prosecution of anyone found culpable in the mobilisation of fake corps members. This meeting is therefore part of the enlightenment for the officers to know that ignorance of the law is not an excuse,” he warned.

Speaking on the sidelines, the JAMB Registrar also hinged the delay in the release of the recently taken Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) on malpractices.

“We have no reason not to release the result but we are also doing some internal appraisal. We don’t want a situation where we release result we will still withdraw some.

“We have asked people to submit reports particularly of malpractices and when we scrutinised after the first day, we noticed that about 40 per cent of the report were not in, we concluded that there is no need releasing the result and creating confusion.

“We had insisted that we will not release result this year until we have all the reports of examination malpractices. The issue of releasing result and cancelling it will be very few this year rather than the large number we had previously. We already have about 70 per cent of the reports updated but we want it 100 per cent,” he said. (Daily Sun)

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