Business owners and legal practitioners are voicing concerns over mounting delays and bureaucratic hurdles in the business registration process at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), despite the agency’s claims of a 24-hour registration policy.
In interviews with BusinessDay, over 10 CAC applicants and customers described their frustrations with prolonged wait times, unresolved requests, and perplexing queries from CAC officials. These issues are afflicting registrations and changes for business names, limited liability companies, and incorporated trustees.
In March 2015, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) launched an online portal and subsequently introduced a 24-hour business registration policy.
The policy brought about speedy company registrations and quick resolution of queries. Registration of business names, limited liability companies and incorporated trustees happened within 24 or 48 hours. Removal or inclusion of directors was not an issue as it would be concluded within 48 hours.
“For us, a customer is a king and must be treated with royalty,” Mahmud Bello, the then registrar-general of the CAC, said at a customer forum in Kano in 2017.
Fast-forward to 2024, more than 10 CAC applicants and customers who spoke with BusinessDay said the situation is no longer the same.
Integrity Organisation Limited, a limited liability company, planned to remove one of its directors. In April 2024, it applied for the director’s removal through the CAC’s registrar-general, making the necessary payments and submitting the required documents.
The company got an email response from the CAC, assuring that the issue would be resolved. However, the issue has not been resolved seven months after – amid complaints by the company. Hence the CAC has also not removed the director as requested by the company, BusinessDay learnt.
Emmanuel Okeke, a law lecturer and human rights activist, applied to the CAC to increase a company’s share capital. The company has three directors, with one having 800,000 shares and two others possessing N100, 000 shares each.
Okeke wrote to the CAC requesting to increase the company’s share capital and include a new director.
“A CAC official started prompting me to pay a penalty for the share capital that was not allotted. The penalty, jokingly, was above N500,000. I asked the official to identify the shares that were not allotted.
“I wrote emails and explained that all shares were allotted, but the CAC kept on asking me to pay a penalty. At a point, they came back to me, reducing the shares of the majority shareholder from 800,000 to 720,000. By Implication, 80,000 shares were not allotted. I scanned all the required documents and sent them to the CAC, but they still kept on asking for a penalty.”
He further said that, on a different occasion, he applied to convert a business name to a company but a query came from the CAC asking him to remove the names and details of the trustees.
“In a company, there are no provisions for trustees. I checked several times to ensure that there were no errors somewhere, but they kept querying me and asking for the removal of trustees of a company. It took several weeks to resolve this,” he said.
Samuel Oyigbo, a lawyer, reminisced about the time when a company’s registration would be perfected in 24 or 48 hours.
“I wanted to change directors of a company. We made an application and uploaded the required documents, yet the names of the new directors were not online. When they finally uploaded the names, they left some,” he said.
He noted that there are still some manual aspects of the registration process despite the CAC’s claim of deploying the digital process to onboard businesses.
The CAC initially said that individuals could register businesses without requiring the services of lawyers.
However, Edem Ekanem, a Lagos-based small business operator, said he tried to register a business name but it did not work.
“First of all, I did not get responses from the CAC for over a week, so I had to resort to paying for the services of a lawyer,” he claimed.