JAMB Has Not Cancelled Any Admission – Registrar

Candidates directed to get further information at institutions of their choice

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has allayed the fears of candidates whose admission fate had been kept in the balance because of the prolonged strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

The board assured such candidates that despite the strikes that had affected the academic calendar since 2020, no offer of admission it made to candidates who wrote the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) had been cancelled.

ASUU had gone on strike for 10 months in 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19.

This year, the union was on strike for another eight months, thereby disrupting the academic calendar, leading to a backlog of admissions which many public universities are battling to resolve.

The board urged the affected candidates to relate with their institutions of choice to find out the session they are currently running.

JAMB Registrar/Chief Executive, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, spoke on these issues, among others, before he declared open the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU) yesterday in Abuja.

He said the Senate of each university was responsible for admission, adding that the role of JAMB is to supervise the process to ensure that candidates are not shortchanged.

Oloyede said: “The onus of admitting students lies on the respective institutions. JAMB is a coordinating centre; JAMB cannot and will not determine any institution’s academic calendar. You are aware that universities and special institutions are still in their 2020/2021 academic session. Some are in the 2021/2022 academic session and some are in the 2022/2023 academic session.

“We have three academic sessions running in universities in different parts of the country. My advice is that candidates should interact with their respective institutions to know which session is going on and contact JAMB…

“No admission has been cancelled for any session or for any institutions except the Senate of that institution says so.

“We have all admissions for these three sessions and they have not lapsed and they will not lapse. It is now up to the institutions to determine which and how to go about it.”

NASU’s General Secretary Peters Adeyemi said the union’s Joint Action Committee (JAC) and Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) called of their strike to give room for the implementation of the agreement they reached with the Federal Government.

The union leader said the unions were being careful to avoid collapsing the Education sector through strikes.

He said the JAC of NASU and SSANU expected the Federal Government to make arrangements for payment of salary arrears for the four months their members went on strike.

Adeyemi noted that since all parties within the university system had suspended their industrial actions, it behooves the government to start reviewing those hard stances it took while the tertiary institutions were under lock and key.

The NASU general secretary said a moratorium given to the Federal Government, which elapses in November, should serve as a veritable opportunity for the government to sit down and begin to address existing demands by the unions, one of which is the salary arrears.

He stressed that under no circumstance would the government sweep the issue under the carpet, especially when it obliged the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) similar gesture after they suspended their two month strike in 2020.

Asked if the Federal Government was still disposed to offsetting the salary arrears, going by its initial stance of “no work, no pay”, Adeyemi said: “That is the next issue. They say that if there is fire in the house, you first of all make sure that you put off the fire. If you get consumed in the fire, you can’t save anybody.”

He added: “Now, the process of talking about unpaid salaries will start. Nobody will say the schools are closed. This is the ideal time to begin to appeal to those who have taken those hard stances and we believe that those hard stances were as a result of the fact that the schools were under lock and key.

“I have confidence as a union person that those salaries will be paid, because it has been paid to the guys in the health sector, two months, this Minister of Labour and Employment facilitated the payment and he is still there, I am confident he will facilitate this payment.”

NASU’s National President, Dr. Hassan Makolo, who corroborated Adeyemi’s position, said members of trade unions do not just embark on strikes to play to the gallery, contrary to the erroneous belief in the public.

According to him, a decision to call a strike does not come easy for unionists because it is done at a great cost to members and the unions.

October 27, 2022