The Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Industry, Trade & Investment, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole has stated that registering a new company in Nigeria can now be done online and within 24 hours provided ALL procedures and requirements for online registration are met. She made the statement while speaking at the one-day sensitization summit organized by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Lagos yesterday. According to her; “This is a far cry from the 10 or more days it used to take in the past, which has resulted in significant time and cost savings.”

The CAC sensitization summit was declared open by the Acting Registrar/CEO of the CAC, Lady Azinge Azuka Obiageli who informed the audience that the event was one of many planned, as others would be taking place in Kaduna, Kano, Port Harcourt and other cities in the coming weeks. According to her, the Corporate Affairs Commission would be phasing out manual company registration in an additional ten states, with a total phaseout expected in the nearest future.

The summit was an opportunity for officials of the Corporate Affairs Commission, stakeholders, entrepreneurs, SME owners and members of the general public to engage on some of the reform initiatives being carried out by the commission as part of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council’s (PEBEC) 60-day National Action Plan 2.0 which was launched on the 3rd of October.
According to Dr Oduwole, the Enabling Business Environment Secretariat has been supporting the Corporate Affairs Commission to enhance efficiency in the process of business registrations, one of which has seen the CAC simplify its processes by condensing multiple forms previously required for registering a company into a single form - the CAC Form 1.1.

More importantly, company registration process is now exclusively online in Lagos, since the manual registration window closed earlier in the year. Manual registration portals have also been closed in Abuja, Kano, Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Enugu. These reforms were put in place to help businesses save cost and time while also removing rent-seeking opportunities from the process by reducing the need for human contact.