The Road from Ideas to Practice

Anthony Kila draws attention to salient issues that demand the attention of the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporate Affairs Commission

Dear Alhaji Garba Abubakar, This epistle is directed at you by virtue of your role as the Registrar and CEO of the Nigerian Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). As CEO, it

is your duty to make sure your organization implements the vison and ideas that you, together with members of your board and other stakeholders feel meet the needs of those that you service. The entities

you service include government on one side, individuals and corporate entities on the other. Yours is a unique organization in the sense that it is one of those few

government-managed monopolies wherein a large chunk of what you manage finds the interests of the regulator and that of the regulated coincide perfectly or at least mostly. The government on behalf of whom you act wants business to be registered and be counted as growing in number. The businesses you register come to you to be

registered and most of them have to be seen as registered. Your task amongst others is to make this happen. The more businesses you

register the better for all. To address the issue of Ease of Doing Business (EDB) in Nigeria, this government developed some set of ideas part of which was to simplify the process of business registration. Along this road, in October 2020 the government announced the approval for the free business registration initiatives for Medium, Small and Micro businesses (MSME) as part of the post COVID survival intervention. The cost for that

intervention, it appeared from media reports, was to be borne partly by the government and partly by your CAC. I wondered then why the government was going Dutch with you rather than just write off the expenses. Still on the road to making things better, your commission has

embarked on a very significant digitalization of your process. Part of the intention of this effort is to allow members of the public to be able to deal with your commission via your website and portal. The COVID experience catalyzed this process for you so that walking into your offices to speak to and interact with your team has become an exercise reserved for just a very few selected individuals. Such is the case, at least in Lagos and Abuja, where we studied your operations. It must be said that technically and theoretically, potential entrepreneurs can do all they want via your website and portal.

They can get information, submit applications and enquires, pay required fees, upload required documents and even get their digital certificates online without visiting your offices. This undoubtedly is a very good step in the right direction; for a Nigerian governmental agency managing monopolized services, it is even to be considered a quantum leap. The process, like all digitalized process, is designed to make operations swifter, more transparent, more predictable and less prone to man-made distortions such as favouritism, whims and even extortions and other forms of corruption.

This is however only technically and theoretically, in practice your system is still slow, ambiguous and often pedantic. Dear Registrar, there is no other way to put it: Your system is in practice still far from its potential and very far from the ideal and cannot even to be considered a case study for best practice by your counterparts across the globe.

Given what you have put in place and all you have done or tried to do, the next road to take is to find a way to move from idea to practice. From an outsider’s perspective, the main issue you are facing and what is keeping you from becoming a world class agency is the human factor. Too many of those charged with implementing the ideas of the

commission and operating its system do not seem to be at par with the grand ideas guiding the commission. The buck stops at your desk anyway, good or bad, everything that happens at the commission should and will be linked to your ability to be a CEO. Dear Registrar, you are getting the missive as invitation to find the road from ideas to practice. The first step on such road is to reframe the understanding of those that you deal with. You need to realize and educate your team, all of them, that those that come to use your services do not really see your commission as adding value to their ventures and vision. These are entrepreneurs that come to you not

because they want to but because they have to. They are fee paying users who have at least 10 different things they could do with the time and money they are constrained to dedicate to your commission. Everyone in your team needs to know that those they deal with are creators of job and wealth, two things that the country desperately need. You need to find a way to let your team know that their role is to enable, accelerate and even guide users towards a rapid and stress- free engagement with your agency.

A reset in mindset of those implementing the ideas of the commission will easily show that a lot can be done to improve communication of the CAC. Emails and updates need to be treated at least five times faster than time they take now. Telephone lines need to work. Someone has to audit your telephone lines and numbers with a bid to discard the ones not functioning and add more if need be. Those that respond to phone calls need to be empowered to solve issues, a dashboard that gives information is all that is needed.

Lexicons like “queried” should be modified. Which of your staff would like to receive a query? The points raised here are so far are simple steps based on education and persuasion but not all evil comes out of ignorance. Some people are mischievous and deliberately make the system complex so that users can beg and bribe. It is your duty dear CEO to set standards and targets.

As registrar, you have to find ways to monitor your people and operations to make sure that those working to thwart the commendable ideas of the commission are sanctioned and those working for success rewarded. On the road that leads from ideas to practice there are many stones, it is the duty of the traveler to know which to skip or break and which ones to treasure.

Prof Anthony Kila is Centre Director at CIAPS Lagos