The Public Communication Adviser of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, Dr Fabian Benjamin, has disclosed that the examination body has remitted over N50bn as operating surplus to the Federal Government in the last 10 years.
Benjamin stated this during a dialogue organised by the Education Writers’ Association of Nigeria via Zoom.
The dialogue, themed “2026 Admission Policy Review and JAMB Scorecard: A Conversation with the Registrar,” examined key issues surrounding admissions and tertiary education in Nigeria and provided an overview of Prof Ishaq Oloyede’s leadership of the board for the past 10 years.
According to Benjamin, the remittances were made in compliance with the law requiring government agencies to remit a percentage of their operating surplus and should not be misconstrued as evidence that JAMB was established to generate revenue.
He said, “There is an impression that JAMB has become a revenue-generating agency. It is not,” he said.
“JAMB is not a revenue-generating agency. But there is a regulation that every agency, whether revenue-generating or not, must remit a certain percentage of its excess surplus. What JAMB is doing is not out of place. It is part of the rule.
“In the last 10 years, I cannot state the exact amount generated, but I can say that over N50bn has been remitted back to the Federal Government as excess surplus.”
Benjamin explained that the board was able to generate savings through technological innovations and cost-cutting measures introduced under the Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede.
Recall that earlier in the year, a director in the office of the JAMB registrar, Muftau Bello, when he presented the board’s 2026 budget proposal before the Senate committee on tertiary institutions and TETFund, projected N23.8bn in internally generated revenue for 2026 and planned to remit N6bn to the Federation Account as operating surplus.
In his overview of Oloyede’s tenure, he recalled that the board, in 2016, replaced the Very Small Aperture Terminal technology previously deployed for examinations with telecommunication-based connectivity using SIM cards.
According to him, the transition reduced the cost of connectivity for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination from about N1.2bn to less than N100m.
“When Prof. Oloyede came in, we were mounting VSAT dishes in all examination centres and paying about N1.2bn for the exercise. He believed technology should enable the board to examine at a far lower cost.
