Dibu Explained that Ongoing ASUU Strike Won’t Affect 2014 JAMB:
The Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the Joint Admission and Matriculations Board (JAMB), Professor Dibu Ojerinde, has explained that despite the ongoing strike action by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the activities of the Board would not be affected, especially as it concerns the sale of forms for next year’s Universal Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
Professor Ojerinde, who made the disclosure to Sunday Tribune yesterday, while responding to questions on why JAMB embarked on sale of forms when the last batch of successful candidates were yet to secure admissions into the universities, said the strike could not deter JAMB from selling forms, noting that the universities would know how to handle the situation.
“The universities will know how to sort the situation to ensure that the two batches are admitted. JAMB cannot wait for the universities that are on strike; after all, private universities will also have to admit and we cannot stop the exam unless we don’t want private universities to admit. In any case, the federal universities know how to handle the situation to ensure that the backlog is not many, and if any of them informs JAMB that it cannot admit, we will delete that university from the admission exercise for this year,” he said.
Professor Ojerinde, however, noted that so far, none of the universities had approached JAMB that it could not admit and should be delisted because it still had a pending batch, noting that most of the universities had been doing their admissions, with some of them having completed the admission exercise.
“University of Benin has done 100 per cent of its admission; Obafemi Awolowo University has done more than 70 per cent, and even LAUTECH has done its admission. The only university that I know has a problem is the University of Maiduguri and that is because of the Boko Haram debacle. So, they will sort things out,” he added.
It will be recalled that the UTME platform had collapsed matriculation examinations into universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, another reason advanced by JAMB for the sales of JAMB forms despite the strike action by university lecturers.