Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the reduction in the cost of forms for the Joint Admissions Matriculation’s Board’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (JAMB UTME), National Examination Council’s Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (NECO SSCE) and the Basic Education Certificate Examination.

The Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, announced this on Wednesday during the Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja.

“The Exam Agencies are not meant to be revenue generating bodies, they’re only supposed to cover costs/operating expenses,” Adamu said.

“The sharp increase in remittances by JAMB (from less than N60m in 2010–2016 to >N15 BILLION in 2017/18) have shown that the fees being charged could be reduced,” he added.

Meanwhile, JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, in August had said that there is no plan to review downward the fee of Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) form from the current N7,500.

He said the UTME registration fee is one of the cheapest in the world and stated that remittances were made possible by the prudent management of resources by the board.

However, the minister, in his announcement stated that the president directed the Ministry to look into the reduction following the “significant improvement in revenues being remitted to the Treasury by the Education Agencies.”

The reduction will be implemented from January 2019 with the cost of JAMB UTME Form dropping from N5,000 to N3,500, NECO will drop from N11,350 to N9,850.