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There are about 800,000 companies in Nigeria registered between June 2004 and 2010, the Corporate Affairs Commission says.
Garba Abubakar, the Special Adviser to the Registrar General of the commission, disclosed this at the weekend.
Mr. Abubakar attributed the growth in the registration of companies to the deployment of information and communications technologies registration.
“The total number of registered companies we have today is in the range of 800,000. There are 2.8million business names and about 38 000 cooperative groups,” he said. “Every month we register about 2000 companies, in a year we register between 25,000 to 30,000 companies. We have been doing that consistently since 2004.”
Mr. Abubakar further stated that the agency received an average of three thousand requests for name reservation per day, but some reserved names are often not registered.
“Before 2004 company registration was done manually,” he said. “Apart from checking for names, registration and generation of certificate was being done manually. Incorporation process was often duplicated, because of this and given the increasing number of companies being registered in the country from less a record of less than 200,000 when the company was created in 2001 to about 6 to 700,000 in 2004 when the online registration started, the Commission decided to deploy eRegistration.
“Management now adopted to design software for that purpose. From 2004 till date, registration of companies is done electronically through a workflow ranging from reservation of name up to generation of certificates.”
Moving into fibre optics
Mr Abubakar also noted that the commission had used Very Small Aperture Terminal, VSAT for its internet connection but that with the increased growth in business, the service is no longer adequate and that arrangements are in top gear to migrate to fibre optics platform.
“When we started, we were relying solely on VSAT to link all offices in the 36 states of the federation but it has its own challenges. Connectivity is a problem because unlike in advanced countries where ICT infrastructure is available, they have connected not to VSAT but fibre optics connection all over,” he said.
“So, because of the frequent occurrence of cyber downtime and the issues of connectivity, the commission decided that we should migrate from the VSAT platform to fibre optics. We have decided that five offices at the moment will be linked to the new service platform.” He said the contract has been awarded to Globacom to provide cyber optics to the company so that their offices in Lagos, Kaduna Port Harcourt, Enugu and Benin will soon be using fibre optics. It is expected the offices will be connected by December.
“We will discard VSAT because of inherent problems. That is the first stage and by next year all the other offices will be on fibre optics instead of VSAT,” he said.