Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) candidates who could not generate their profile code because of poor network or delayed response from telecommunication service providers will get a refund, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said.
The board’s decision came following 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) costs N50 on the major telecoms service providers.
The board said this doesn’t apply to candidates who entered the wrong code while trying to generate their profile codes.
Ishaq Oloyede, JAMB registrar, said after a meeting with stakeholders on Monday at the headquarters of the board in Bwari, that the service providers and JAMB agreed on the refund.
He lamented that parents were being extorted by telecoms service providers by sending requests unsuccessfully to the telcos.
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The registrar said the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Nigerian Communications Commission have been drafted in 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.
“We have reached this agreement with Digital Pulse that we will work with the service providers to make sure that the service providers refund where they have taken money from candidates,” Oloyede said.
“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,” he said.
He said JAMB would immediately invite NCC and FCCPC to join the task force on the registration and examination so that any act of extortion they have the capacity to deal with any stakeholder that decides to extort candidates.
“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,” he said.
The registrar said by Friday, candidates would have the option of using the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data to generate their profile code.
