The spokesperson for the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Fabian Benjamin, has said the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) results glitch “has nothing to do with ethnicity.”

“It’s unfortunate. It’s something that we never envisaged,” said Benjamin, during an X Spaces chat.

The spokesperson made this known while dismissing claims that the glitch that led to a mass failure in the 2025 UTME was targeted at candidates from the Southeast region.

Speaking further, Benjamin revealed that members of the board couldn’t sleep when they noticed the glitch.

“What really happened? Let me just put it this way. Somebody was supposed to upload something, just as you send an email with your laptop and you see a sign that says sent and then you closed the laptop. The person just sent without waiting for it to deliver and then he shut down and left. This person, technically, is not even a staff of the board, but he’s a service provider that the board had hired, paid huge sum of money to do what he was supposed to do. I’m not supposed to go deep because it’s as if one is shifting responsibility,” he said.

Benjamin dismissed claims that the incident was intentional, just as he blamed it on carelessness on the part of the assigned officer.

“It was just carelessness, he didn’t understand the responsibility that was placed on his shoulder. It’s unfortunate that this thing happened and a section of the country was involved. It’s unfortunate that, to some extent, it will begin to cast some aspersion on our area of operation,” he said.

Benjamin also faulted claims that the issue occurred because of incompetence on the part of the JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Oloyede.

According to him, Oloyede is more than competent because he gets involved in everything going on in the board.

“Someone of us feel like he’s too involved. He’s somebody that would want to know who even comes in at the gate. He’s involved in every aspect of the board. So the issue of whether incompetence or carelessness is not there. It’s just that no matter how involving you are, no matter how competent you are and no matter how engaging you are, as long as you cannot do the whole thing alone, certainly, somebody somewhere will let you down out of negligence,” he said.