The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has disclosed that it would refund registration fees of candidates who could not generate their profile code due to poor network or delayed response from telecommunication service providers for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
It, however, said that candidates who entered the wrong code while trying to generate their profile codes would not be refunded.
JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede who disclosed this in Abuja on Monday after a meeting with stakeholders noted that the service providers and JAMB agreed on the refund.
The JAMB’s decision followed the public outcry against the inability of many candidates registering for the 2021 UTME to create their profile codes despite being charged for the service.
Each Short Message Service (SMS) cost N50 on the major telecoms service providers.
Oloyede lamented that parents were being extorted by telecoms service providers by sending request unsuccessfully to the telcos.
According to him, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) have been drafted to monitor the refund.
“All those concerned will have to go back and ensure that when a service is not fully rendered and if there had been any charge that had been made, this should be refunded to the candidates,” Oloyede said.
“We have reached this agreement with Digital Pulse that we will work with the service providers to make sure that the service providers refund the money taken from the candidates.”
“I have a parent who said she sent the message (to create a profile) 500 times; the message was not going, the service was not delivered and N50 was being deducted. This is the general outcry from across the country and that is one of the reasons we called this meeting.”
“And the first thing is that such money is to be refunded but because JAMB does not have the capacity to know whether this is refunded or not; we are not in a position to know whether the money has been refunded or not. We then decided that we are going to expand the stakeholders – that our stakeholders should include Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.”
“We will immediately invite them to join this task force of ours on this registration and examination, so that any act of extortion they have the capacity to deal with any stakeholder that decides to extort candidates. The second one is to invite NCC.”
“NCC is the regulatory body for all these telcos. Even if they give us assurance and it is not followed, we do not have the capacity to enforce. That is why we believe the NCC that has the statutory responsibility to enforce should also be brought in as part of our stakeholders.”
The registrar said by Friday, candidates will have the option of using the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data to generate their profile code.
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