The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has released the results of its supplementary Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Fabian Benjamin, the board’s national spokesperson, confirmed the development in a statement on Friday.

A total of 28,835 candidates participated in the supplementary examination, which was conducted on June 21 and 22, 2024.

Some of the participants were those who were unable to be biometrically verified during the main UTME while others were alleged to have been involved in exam malpractice.

Benjamin urged UTME candidates to refrain from soliciting score upgrades and generating fake results with higher scores.

“Some nefarious characters, who had attempted to impersonate bona fide candidates were apprehended and handed over to law enforcement agencies for further investigation and prosecution,” he said.

“The board would continue to ensure that no candidate benefits from any acts of infractions through the deployment of state-of-the-art technology before, during and after its examinations.

“Candidates are, therefore, urged in their interest to refrain from engaging in any form of irregularities during their examinations.”

Last month, the exam body released 36,540 withheld UTME results.

A father and his son were earlier arrested for alleged impersonation during the UTME.

To check their supplementary UTME results, candidates are to send UTMERESULT to either 55019 or 66019.

This is to be done on the same phone number with which they generated their profile codes at the start of registration.

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has approved the disbursement of student loans to all successful applicants in its first rollout.

President Bola Tinubu enacted an initial version of the student loan policy in June 2023 to grant interest-free loans to students.

The scheme was to commence in October 2023 but implementation was repeatedly deferred until a re-enactment in April 2024.

NELFUND recently scheduled the opening of the pilot phase of the loan application and issuance portal for May 24.

The fund, in a statement on Thursday after its inaugural board meeting, approved the disbursement for its first rollout.

It said the approval of the loan is part of the organisation’s commitment to empowering students through financial support.

“By approving the immediate disbursement of the loans, NELFUND is taking a critical step in fulfilling its mission to support education and empower the next generation of leaders,” the fund added.

NELFUND had stated that the scheme’s pilot phase would only be open to federal tertiary institutions.

The fund also said the scheme would be open to state-owned tertiary institutions in its second rollout initially planned for June 25.

This second rollout was later postponed by 14 days to July 10 due to inadequate data.

NEFLUND said state-owned institutions failed to upload the required student and fee data to the verification system on its portal.

The Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on Wednesday ended their closed-door meeting with an agreement that all contentious issues will be amicably resolved to avert a strike.

The parties also agreed to kick-start a communication process to avert the planned industrial actions by the union.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports the parties had entered into a close-door meeting which began at about 4:30 p.m. at the Ministry’s headquarters in Abuja.

The meeting which lasted for over two hours,

had in attendance the two Ministers overseeing Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, and Dr Yusuf Sununu and other top officials in the ministry in the federal government’ team

The ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, who led the union’s team, told newsmen after the meeting that the negotiation process had begun while hoping that the federal government would follow up on what had been agreed on.

“We have discussions on all the issues and we have given assignments to some people to look at, and agree on the way forward.”

On the two-week ultimatum issued by the union, Osodeke said they would go back and give the details of the meeting to their members.

“What is important is that we have started the process and our prayers is that we resolve it for the interest of our young men and the interest of the nation.

“The government has spent one year in office and we have not been called for any formal meeting. Today we are having the first formal meeting.

“There is a process we have started and we are going to set deadlines, we are going to meet to look at what has been done on those issues and we hope the process will continue,” he said.

On his part, Mamman said that consultations would commence immediately to overcome the problems bedevilling education.

“We’ve had a very good meeting and a very productive one. We’ve discussed progress on how to ensure that the system works well and lots of the issues we talked about are those that we inherited and some ongoing.

“We discussed them all without exception and we have a consensus on the way forward.

“A lot of consultations will continue on some information we don’t have, which is beyond the scope of the ministry and which will require us to connect with our colleagues in other ministries.

“But, the most important thing is that we had a very good meeting and agreed to continue with the consultations to overcome the problems bedevilling education in Nigeria,” he said.

It will be recalled that ASUU had threatened to embark on a nationwide strike over the federal government’s failure to meet its demands.

The union had charged the government to act within two weeks to address all outstanding demands by the union.

Some of the issues of contention are removal from IPPIS, Renegotiation of the 2009 FGN/ASUU Agreement, all the backlog of Earned Academic Allowance (EAA) and all the outstanding salaries, among others.