The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has shut down seven examination centres across Bayelsa State for violating its rules and regulations for examination.
According to available data, the closure of the centres leaves Bayelsa state with only four centres to cater for about 24,000 candidates.
The state coordinator of JAMB, Abdusalam Mohammed, who made this known during a call on the leadership of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in Yenagoa, explained that some of the examination centres were delisted for duplicating the Virtual Private Network (VPN) of their router.
Others were delisted for charging unsuspecting candidates outrageous sums of money during registration.
His words, “Initially Bayelsa had eleven examination centres, and so far seven out of this number have been delisted from our platform for various infractions.
The owners of some of these centres tampered with the VPN of our router. And that is a very big offence.
“They duplicated the VPN by moving the router from one location to another location where they did whatever they liked, which is a very big offence. “Others were overcharging candidates.
During registration, we sent out a monitoring team out and they came back with the report that candidates were charged N5,000 for a service that should ordinarily cost N2, 500.
” Mohammed also gave insight into the level of preparedness of the board to conduct examination as coronavirus continues to spread saying,
“even before the lockdown was lifted, we had started training our staff on how to attend to candidates. We have also embarked on sensitisation of candidates and provided personal prevention equipment.
