Parents and candidates on Friday vented frustration at the Good Success Computer-Based Test Centre, Utako, Abuja, after network failures disrupted the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for the second straight day.
A displeased parent, Mr. David Afolanyo in an interview with newsmen, said his daughter was first told on Thursday that there was no network and asked to return Friday, only to be told after waiting since 6 a.m. that she would get a text message for examination rescheduling.
Afolanyo who was expressing his frustration during the Senate Committee on Tertiary Education monitoring of the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in Abuja on Friday, questioned who will pay for the children to be relocated to another centre when some had already spent between N6,000 to N10,000 on transport to get to the venue.
“My daughter is writing, she was supposed to write yesterday. They said there was no network. They said we should come today to write. We came today. We’ve been here since 6 o’clock.
“They are talking about relocating the children to another center. Some children paid more than N6,000 to N10,000 as transport to get here. Who will pay for them to go there again? Who will pay for them to go there again?”, he asked.
He queried whether the lawmakers were only just realising the hitches in the UTME, pointing out that both the Senate and the House of Representatives have committees on education.
“So they want to tell me that they don’t know about this problem since three years ago?” he asked.
Similarly, a candidate named Eunice Peter who travelled from Kaduna lamented that she paid N7,000 and lodged overnight, arriving at the centre by 5 a.m only to be told she would be rescheduled.
Responding, Public Communication Advisor of JAMB, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, assured candidates whose examinations were disrupted that they would be rescheduled to write them at a later date.
Benjamin maintained that the glitches were expected, saying naturally one should expect one or two challenges when conducting an exam using one thousand centres.
“We are assuring all Nigerians that every candidate who have registered for this exam will be given the opportunity to sit this exam. If your center fails today, you will be rescheduled again to take the exam. For any reason, even when you are rescheduled, and for any reason again, you are unable to sit the examination, you will be rescheduled again.
“That is why when we finish the exam, we have what we call the mop-up. The mop-up is to ensure that candidates whose center failed and they could not take the exam, we mop them up, give them a particular date for them to sit the examination. Because it’s a contract we have entered with them, they must sit the examination.
“But we’ll continue to do our best to ensure that we have minimal failure of these centers. And that is what we are doing. Out of 957 that we are using for this examination, I’m not sure we’ve had up to 10 or 8 centers that have failed”, he added.
On his part, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFund, Senator Mohammed Dandutse agreed that JAMB and CBT centers were faced with a lot of challenges but promised to resolve them.
“From what we have seen, we have seen progress and we have seen a lot of challenges faced by the centres.And this one is not only in Abuja, it’s throughout the country. As a matter of fact, we sincerely appreciate what we have seen so far. Because the other issue is a technical issue, it happened yesterday and it also happened today, which was explained by the supervisor.
“But the truth of the matter, it has been a constraint to JAMB because these issues need to be addressed even before the exam takes place.
“As senators who are solely responsible for oversight and investigating the matters arising to this JAMB exam, I think we are going to look into how best JAMB will improve in most of the activities.
“We have already instructed them and told them to, as a matter of urgency, to take a definitive action so that the student will write the exam. And at the same time, we are going to review all the activities in JAMB so that we can make sure that these things do not happened again.
“So definitely we are going to address it and we are going to make sure that all the CBT centers are well functional and efficient. Because there is no moral justification for somebody to come from far away and will be living in trauma without writing the exam”, he said.
The UTME exercise which started on April 16, 2026 is on its Day 2 and will be concluded on April 22, 2026, with no fewer than 2.2 million candidates expected to sit for the examination in about 966 Computer-Based Test (CBT) centres across the country .
What do you think about this?
Drop your opinion in the comment section.
FOLLOW US & Share this with someone who needs to see this.
🚨BREAKING: Watch The Video Clip Here ➤
