A woman who claims to be a ‘prophetess’ has admitted to asking her son to impersonate his brother in the ongoing Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), organised by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

According to officials of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) who apprehended the suspected impersonator on Thursday, the alleged offender was arrested at Air Mas Computer Centre, Madalla, Niger State.

Mother and children were chastised by Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar of JAMB, but their names were not given.

Oloyede said, “Parents need to disassociate themselves from this type of shameful attitude.

“It is against any type of parenting that you want to inculcate the spirit of deceit into your children; I think even bad people do not want to be succeeded by bad people.

“The woman should have just said she is a mother and not that she is a prophetess; you are doing something shameful, do not bring God into it at all.

“No religion would allow for a mother to tell one of her sons to go and write exams for the other. If someone is unfortunate to be corrupt, he or she should ask God to terminate it at his own level, but conscious efforts at transmitting that culture to the next generation is very painful.’’

Oloyed also expressed reservations about those hiding behind religion to commit crimes, including examination malpractice.

“One said he is a Catholic priest; there’s another one from Abia and now, this mother said she’s a prophetess; people in Nigeria just use religion to exploit others.

“They go to churches, establish centres in the name of helping the church, only to use them for their selfish purposes.”

He explained that the board was able to detect, through the use of technology, that most of the cabling issues at CBT centres, were pre-arranged.

“Their intentions are to help people not knowing that we now have a device that monitors every computer system in every centre, via a code,” he said.

He reiterated that there would be no rescheduling of the 2018 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam (UTME) for any student that missed the examination unlike last year.

“We would not be held responsible for that and there won’t be any form of rescheduling for anybody, I did that last year out of ignorance.”