Father Arrested For Writing Son’s UTME Exam

The police have arrested a father and his son for impersonating the latter during the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

The Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, disclosed this during an inspection tour of UTME centres in Kaduna.

Prof. Oloyede expressed overall satisfaction with the conduct of the 2024 examination, although he highlighted a few instances of impersonation.

He said the malpractice was due to the prevalence of individuals possessing multiple National Identity Numbers (NIN), thereby undermining the identity verification process.

He said, “Across the country, most of the problem we have is impersonation. For instance, now, we say we have an NIN, we now have cases of people with two NINs, and therefore, that has defeated the purpose of identity verification. We are going to take that up with NIMC—that there are people who have two NINs.

“We have a case of a father impersonating his son, writing examination for the son, and I wonder, are you not destroying your son’s future? Of course, two of them are now in custody. I can’t understand what the father will now tell his son when they are both locked up in the same cell. This definitely happened not in Kaduna, but I don’t want to disclose the state.

“So, it is largely a case of impersonation, but we are ahead of them; we are just picking them up like chickens now, because the facilities are there for us to see what they are doing and to pick them up. And even those that we have left for research purposes, they will see what will happen after the exams.”