The National Centre for Technology Management (NACETEM) has said Nigeria will be saving about ₦5 billion annually through the Federal Government’s digital migration of filing processes in governance.

Director General and Chief Executive Officer of NACETEM, Dr Olushola Odusanya, stated this in Abuja at a workshop organised by the agency on the application of systems thinking and system dynamics for transforming public policymaking processes.

Dr Odusanya said the migration of filing processes from analogue to digital will save the country several billions of naira.

He pointed out that with the digitisation of processes, the efficiency of the system will improve, service delivery will improve, and people can have better lives.
His words: “The Federal Government spends about ₦5 billion on printing paper annually. Imagine what the state, local governments and private sector spend.

“So the Federal Government is thinking that if it saves that ₦5 billion, and invests it in digital migration, we will save a significant amount of money, efficiency of the system improves, service delivery improves and people can have better lives.

“So that idea of cutting out paper usage is also one of the tenets of the Federal Public Service Reforms. We are actualizing it more or less by first migrating people into systems thinking so that by the time we now migrate everybody into digital platforms, it becomes a piece of cake. Because the fundamental knowledge is already there. It’s just to migrate into a platform that allows us to even provide services more efficiently while saving a lot of money”.

In his intervention, Professor Azikiwe Onwualu, President of the African University of Science and Technology, highlighted systems thinking as a significant challenge in Nigeria, where decisions are often made without considering the broader implications on the entire system.

He cited President Bola Tinubu’s removal of the fuel subsidy as an example, suggesting that a more holistic approach could have identified alternative solutions before making the announcement.

According to him, this lack of systems thinking can lead to unintended consequences and underscores the need for a more integrated approach to decision-making in Nigeria.

He said: “We know that once you remove that subsidy, it will affect quite a number of things. So, we should have done something to prevent what would happen when we removed the subsidy, even though removing it would have been a good thing.

“Anybody that knows the history of this country knows that the best thing to do is to remove the subsidy. But if you use system thinking, I believe there are things we would have done before removing the subsidy. And it happens everywhere”.