A 16-year-old girl named Chizitere Obioha, seeking admission into a higher institution, has accused one of the invigilators of the recent UTME of sexually harassing her while she was taking the test.
In a petition to the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges, and Public Petitions, Chizitere said that during the exam, an invigilator named Mutiu Olayemi asked for her phone number. She refused, and as a result, her results were withheld.
Onyebuchi Obioha, Chizitere’s father, asked the lawmakers to step in and help his daughter.
Neda Imasuen, the Committee’s chairman, submitted the petition on the Senate floor last Tuesday.
While submitting the petition, Mr. Imasuen, the senator representing Edo South, told the upper chamber that the invigilator attempted to befriend Chizitere during the examination, but she declined, and her result was later withheld due to allegations of examination malpractice.
According to Mr. Obioha’s petition, his daughter took the recent UTME exam on April 22 at around noon at the Wisdom House CBT Centre in Ogba, Lagos.
He pointed out that Chizitere’s result was not included in the examination results that JAMB made public. The examination body accused her of engaging in examination malpractice when he asked about it.
According to Chizitere’s father, he complained about the outcome. Still, the examination body insisted his daughter engaged in malpractice, as indicated in the report submitted by the invigilators at the centre where she wrote the examination.
Mr Obioha explicitly stated that his daughter’s results were withheld because she refused to give in to the invigilator’s sexual advances.
He stated that after the examination, the invigilator gave Chizitere a piece of paper with his phone number and a note instructing her to call him.
“I want to bring to your notice a suspicion that we have relating to this case. We are very certain that our daughter is being punished for a crime she did not commit.
“When my daughter came out of the hall on that fateful exam day being the 22nd of April 2024, after she told me that the examination was good, she then handed a tiny piece of paper to me and said that a man in the hall gave it to her to call him after the exam.
“In her exact words, ‘he came around and looked at her name and said that her name was a beautiful name. He then left and came back almost when she was rounding up and dropped this piece of paper and asked her to call him afterwards. She decided to bring the paper to me,” the petition reads.
Chizitere’s father went on to say that he collected the paper from her daughter and then called the invigilator’s phone number to tell him to stay away from his daughter.
He went on to say that Chizitere’s mother had also phoned the invigilator and warned him not to approach their daughter.
“I called the number immediately and asked him why he gave a little girl of 16 years his number to call him. He immediately denied it and said that it was a wrong number. I checked the paper and told him that it was his number that he wrote that I called.
“He cut the line. When we got home, my daughter also told my wife who also placed a call to him and he denied again and also cut the line.
“I then sent a WhatsApp message the same day in the evening to him asking him to desist from this and should apologise. He did not respond. I have that message. I have also attached it here. The number is 08067366564. I checked Truecaller and the name that popped up was MUTIU OLAYEMI”.
In a telephone interview with the media on Sunday, Mr Olayemi denied giving a piece of paper with his phone number to Chizitere during the examination.
The invigilator agreed that he was a supervisor at the examination centre, but stated that he had not given any of the applicants his phone number.
“I didn’t ‘toast’ anybody during the examination or give my phone number to any candidate. I’m already in Abuja as directed by JAMB Abuja to defend myself ,” he said.
On the examination malpractice claim, Mr Olayemi stated that he did not write the report against Chizitere.
He said that the Resident Monitor wrote the report against Ms Chizitere.