Abuja, Nigeria – May 21, 2025 — The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has announced plans to conduct a mop-up examination for candidates who missed the recently concluded 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

JAMB Registrar, Professor Is-haq Oloyede, made this announcement during a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday following a high-level meeting with key education stakeholders. The meeting was convened to review and address challenges that arose during the 2025 UTME.

Oloyede, while acknowledging the emotional strain tied to releasing this year’s UTME results, clarified that the difficulties encountered do not reflect any institutional shortcomings or administrative incompetence.

“So I want to say this clearly, particularly because I accepted responsibility, not because I do not know how to do the work,” Oloyede said. “People that work with me have testified to the fact that I do not care where you come from.”

He stressed that JAMB remains fully committed to addressing and resolving any anomalies in the examination process and strongly refuted claims of ethnic bias or administrative failure. The registrar described such accusations as baseless and driven by ignorance and conspiracy theories.

“I say it for the fourth time that no conspiracy theory is relevant to this case,” he said. “Something happened like people who have been doing something well for years and something just went wrong. I did not throw them under the bus. No.”

Oloyede also condemned what he described as the ethnic profiling of education and warned against exploiting the challenges faced by the board to promote divisive narratives.

“There is nothing to say north, south, or that you buy more outside,” he said, urging Nigerians to judge individuals by their merit and not by their ethnic or regional background.

The date for the mop-up examination will be announced in due course, according to JAMB, with affected candidates advised to monitor the board’s official channels for updates.

The 2025 UTME saw several disruptions in selected centres across the country, prompting calls for re-examinations to ensure no candidate is unfairly denied an opportunity for admission into tertiary institutions.