TheCable

The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) says it hopes to reduce the time spent to register a company to two hours from 24 hours by December 2018.

Azuka Azinge, the acting registrar-general, CAC, made this known during a visit of the senate committee on trade and investment to the commission’s Lagos office in Ikeja on Thursday.

She said the commission has created an enabling environment to allow customers register their businesses within 24 hours to improve the ease of doing business in the country.

In 2017, the country moved up 24 places in the World Bank’s ease of doing business ranking.

“The post-registration is still manual. We are hoping that before the next few months, we should have that online, so that the issue of paying annual returns, which is still very cumbersome at the moment, can be easily achieved.

“We are still working and improving on the pre-registration infrastructure platform. We are hoping that as we continue to do that, the pre-registration process will also become faster, with fewer complaints from the customers.

“We want to reduce the 24 hours it takes to register a company to two hours. We are hoping to do that maybe by the end of the year or before that.”

In April 2017, Mahmud Bello, CAC’s registrar-general at that time, said business owners in Nigeria could conveniently register their businesses online within 48 hours.

He also said the commission had started operating 24 hours company registration process to make startup of business easier in Nigeria.