The Hidden Cost of Nigeria’s Paperwork Culture - Vanguard News

Nigeria’s difficulty with digitisation is not necessarily a lack of technology. The challenge is changing longstanding administrative practices, building public trust, and creating systems that work for ordinary Nigerians.

In Nigeria, completing a simple administrative task can mean visiting several offices, repeatedly providing the same information, and waiting weeks for a process that should take days. For many people, these delays have become so familiar that they feel inevitable.

But this approach has a cost. Beyond the time and money individuals lose, inefficient administrative systems create opportunities for fraud, weaken accountability, and make it harder for institutions to deliver the services people depend on.

Technology offers ways to address some of these problems. However, introducing a digital platform is often the easiest part. The bigger challenge is changing the processes, behaviours and institutional practices that made the old systems inefficient in the first place.

Over the past few years, Cross River State has undertaken several technology-driven projects to address these challenges. Having helped develop and implement some of these systems, I have seen how technology can improve longstanding administrative processes, and why lasting change requires more than software alone.

One of the State’s earliest challenges was the lack of a unified system for recording payments to government institutions. Transactions were difficult to trace, citizens sometimes struggled to verify payments, and fragmented records made revenue oversight more complicated than it needed to be. In some cases, payments were made into personal accounts, while others were asked to pay again because no reliable record existed of their original transactions.

Addressing this required more than building a payment platform. It meant rethinking how institutions collected, recorded, and verified payments, and persuading people within those systems to adopt a different approach.

The result was the Central Authentication and Payment System (CAPS), with Cross River Pay serving as its public-facing payment interface. The system was designed to bring payments across ministries, departments and agencies into a centralised structure, allowing transactions to be recorded and tracked more consistently.

For the state, this meant better visibility into revenue collection and less dependence on fragmented reporting processes. For citizens, it meant they could make payments, obtain digital receipts, and verify transactions without necessarily visiting a government office. Nigerians living abroad could also complete certain transactions remotely, reducing reliance on intermediaries.

These improvements may seem straightforward, but their significance becomes clearer when compared with the practices they replaced. Traceable payments are easier to reconcile; digital receipts give citizens evidence of a transaction; and a centralised record makes discrepancies harder to miss.

Land administration was another challenge the State faced. Across Nigeria, obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy can be a lengthy and costly process. Applicants often navigate multiple offices, while concerns about forged documents, conflicting ownership claims and unreliable records complicate property transactions.

In Cross River, addressing these problems required coordination among the Ministry of Lands, the State Geographic and Information Agency, the Office of the Surveyor General and the department responsible for building authorisations.

Rather than treating each institution as a separate point of contact, the aim was to integrate the processes involved in land administration. Applications could be recorded electronically, assigned unique reference numbers, and processed through a system that made their progress easier to track. Payments were linked to the central payment infrastructure, while Certificates of Occupancy were issued with QR codes linked to the state’s records.

The introduction of digital verification was particularly important. Previously, confirming the authenticity of a land document could require lengthy manual checks. With QR-coded certificates, banks, prospective buyers and other relevant parties can verify documents against the state’s database more quickly.

The changes have also helped shorten processing timelines. In some cases, processes that previously took months or years can now be completed in a few weeks. The experience shows how much delay administrative procedures can cause due to disconnected records, repeated manual checks, and poor coordination between institutions.

Technology must work for the people using itOne lesson we learnt from these projects is that a technically sophisticated system is not necessarily effective. Nigeria has considerable differences in internet access, digital literacy and smartphone access. A platform that works perfectly for someone in Calabar or Lagos may be difficult for someone in a rural community with unreliable connectivity.

This was an important consideration when developing the My Cross River platform, which brings several services together via a mobile application. Alongside smartphone access, we included USSD functionality so people with limited internet connectivity can complete certain transactions on basic mobile phones.

The rationale for these features was that technology should respond to how people live and interact with institutions. If accessing a digital service requires expensive data, a modern smartphone, or technical knowledge that many citizens lack, the system risks excluding some of the people it is intended to serve.

The same principle applies to education. Through the Ultimate Plus portal, Cross River has sought to bring admissions, student records and payments for state-owned tertiary institutions into a more coordinated system. For students and parents, the immediate benefit is completing certain processes without unnecessary physical visits. For institutions, more reliable records can help reduce administrative errors, identify irregularities and improve financial oversight.

These examples point to a broader issue in Nigeria’s approach to digital development. We often measure progress by the number of platforms launched, or services moved online. Yet a more useful question is whether those systems make people’s lives easier.

A digital application that replicates a complex manual process may offer little improvement. If citizens still need to visit several offices to complete a transaction they started online, the underlying problem remains unsolved.

Why changing old systems is difficultPerhaps the most demanding part of our work in Cross River was not developing the technology itself, but rather supporting the institutional changes required to make it useful.

Established administrative processes tend to develop their own routines, incentives and informal arrangements. Some employees are comfortable with familiar ways of working, while others may be concerned about whether they have the skills to use new systems or what the changes mean for their responsibilities.

There can also be resistance from those who benefit from inefficiencies. Where manual processes allow payments to go unrecorded or create opportunities for unofficial charges, greater transparency can threaten those arrangements.

Citizens may also be reluctant to abandon familiar practices. Someone who has always relied on an agent to process land documents may hesitate to use an unfamiliar digital platform, especially if they have little confidence that the new system will work.

Introducing new software cannot always resolve these concerns. They require training, communication, institutional support, and a willingness to address why people resist change.

In Cross River, political commitment played an important role. A dedicated committee oversaw digital adoption across ministries, departments, and agencies, while state leadership directives reinforced the transition from manual to digital processes. This support was necessary because systems intended to improve accountability cannot achieve much if institutions continue to operate parallel manual processes that undermine them.

However, political commitment must be accompanied by institutional capacity. A digital system should not depend indefinitely on the company that developed it or on the administration that introduced it.

For that reason, our work involved documenting systems, training government ICT personnel and establishing handover processes to support their continued operation. The intention was to ensure that the institutions using these platforms could manage them and adapt them as their needs evolved.

This is particularly important in Nigeria, where changes in political leadership can interrupt programmes that require several years to deliver results. Digital infrastructure, like physical infrastructure, needs maintenance, investment and continuity.

A new administration should not have to rebuild an entire system simply because its predecessor introduced it. Public institutions should not become dependent on external vendors for every routine change or technical problem. Sustainability must therefore be considered from the start, not as something to address after a platform launches.

What other states can learnCross River’s experience offers lessons for other Nigerian states, though the same approach may not work everywhere.

One is the importance of starting with a clearly defined problem. In Cross River, the need to improve payment records and revenue oversight provided a practical starting point. Building a more reliable payment infrastructure also laid the foundation for connecting other administrative processes.

This approach is worth considering because digital reforms can easily become fragmented. Different ministries may commission separate platforms to address individual problems, with little consideration for how those systems will communicate or whether they duplicate existing infrastructure.

The result can be several expensive applications that create new administrative burdens rather than reducing them. A more coordinated approach requires institutions to consider how information moves between departments, which records to share, and how citizens interact with the different services they need.

It also requires governments to think carefully about the costs of maintaining these systems. Software needs updates, cybersecurity protocols, reliable hosting and technical support. Public institutions must also have clear rules governing access to personal information and responsibility for protecting it. Without these safeguards, digitisation can introduce new vulnerabilities even as it addresses older problems.

Another lesson is that reform should be measured through outcomes rather than announcements. The number of services available online tells us little about whether those services work reliably or whether people find them easier to use.

More useful measures include how long it takes to complete a transaction, how many physical visits are required, whether payments can be reconciled accurately and how quickly institutions respond when something goes wrong.

These measures also help distinguish between introducing technology and genuine improvements in service delivery. People tend to assume that because a process has been digitised, it has necessarily become more efficient. That is not always the case. Poorly designed digital systems can create delays, especially when institutions have not simplified the underlying procedures.

Our experience in Cross River has reinforced the importance of starting with practical problems, designing around the people who use these systems and ensuring that institutions have the capacity to maintain them. It has also shown that technology cannot compensate for weak accountability or an unwillingness to abandon established practices.

Other states will have different priorities, resources and institutional challenges. There is no single model that can simply be replicated everywhere. But there is value in examining what has worked, what has proved difficult and what can be adapted.

Ultimately, the measure of progress should be straightforward: Can people complete essential transactions more easily? Are public funds easier to account for? Can institutions deliver services more reliably?

These are the outcomes that should determine whether a digital reform has succeeded, regardless of how sophisticated the technology behind it may be.

Bio: Ugi Augustine Ugi is President of Nugi Group, a Nigerian technology company that develops digital systems for public institutions and businesses.

Comments expressed here do not reflect the opinions of Vanguard newspapers or any employee thereof.