By Kachi Okezie, Esq
This commentary is borne not of academic observation, but of a deep-seated professional frustration shared by colleagues in the legal profession and, most acutely, through my role as a mentor to numerous MSMEs and start-ups. I have sat in rooms where brilliant Nigerian founders pitched to Diaspora investors, only to see life-changing capital slip away. The deal-breaker was rarely the idea, talent or market; it was the founder’s inability to produce a simple piece of paper proving their ownership of the intellectual property in the business. In the eyes of a foreign investor, if you cannot prove you own the brand, then you cannot be said to own the business.
Nigeria’s pitch to the world is bold and consistent: we are the giant of Africa, the gateway to a vast consumer market and we are open for business. To a global investor, this sounds like a golden opportunity. Yet upon arrival, they encounter a jarring paradox. They can build a physical factory in months, secure a digital banking licence in weeks and hire a world-class technology team in days, particularly in Lagos, the bustling epicentre of start-ups, innovation and incubators. But when it comes to protecting their brand, the very asset that distinguishes their business, they enter a bureaucratic twilight zone where time stands still.
While official guidance from the Trademarks Registry suggests a competitive timeline of 12 to 18 months, practitioners across the country tell a different story: applications filed in 2019 can still be “awaiting the Journal”. For many, registering a trademark in Nigeria is not a year-long sprint but a five-year marathon through administrative silence.
We often speak of infrastructure in terms of roads, rail and power. But in the 2026 digital economy, intellectual property infrastructure is just as critical. A trademark is the legal title deed to a brand. Without it, an investor cannot reliably license technology, defend against counterfeiters or use the brand as an asset in financing. When a certificate takes years to issue, the message is that capital is welcome but ownership is negotiable. That uncertainty becomes a hidden tax on foreign direct investment. It tells global founders and multinational CEOs that Nigeria’s legal protection remains stuck in a pre-digital era while other parts of the economy move rapidly into the future.
Yet, there is another uncomfortable truth. Not all of this dysfunction is accidental. Corruption should not be understood merely as the exchange of envelopes for favours. It can also manifest in the deliberate preservation of inefficient systems because some individuals benefit from their inefficiency. An opaque, manual and difficult-to-navigate registration process creates opportunities for gatekeeping. When applicants cannot see where their files are, when timelines are uncertain, when routine steps depend excessively on human intervention and when information is difficult to obtain without intermediaries, discretion becomes valuable. And where discretion has value, there will be those ready to monetise it.
This is why the problem cannot be solved simply by exhorting officials to “do better”. Some people benefit from a system that does not work efficiently for everyone. The longer a file sits, the greater the opportunity for someone to become the person who can “move it”. The less transparent the process, the more valuable the person who has inside knowledge of its workings. Similarly, the more cumbersome the bureaucracy, the greater the incentive to pay for shortcuts. This is precisely why 100% digitisation must be understood as more than a technological upgrade. It is an anti-corruption intervention and an ease-of-doing-business reform.
The primary bottleneck is the Trademarks Journal. Historically a physical publication, the wait for a mark to be published for opposition has become a graveyard of brand protection. The solution requires radical execution. The Registry should digitise the entire trademark lifecycle: filing, examination, correspondence, payment, Journal publication, opposition, registration, certification and status tracking. Every material step should generate a digital record, timestamp and auditable trail.
The objective should be 100% digitisation with minimal avoidable human discretion. An applicant should be able to log into a secure portal and see exactly where an application is, what action has been taken, by whom, when it was taken and what the next statutory step is. Where professional judgment is required, that judgment should be recorded and attributable. Where a process is mechanical, it should be automated. Where a statutory deadline expires, the system should flag it automatically.
This will transform not only trademark administration but the wider business environment. A founder should not need a lawyer, agent or personal connection merely to discover the status of an application. An investor should not have to factor administrative uncertainty into the cost and timing of a transaction. A business should be able to establish, verify and enforce its intellectual property rights through the same kind of predictable digital interface increasingly expected of banks, tax authorities and other public institutions.
In other words, digitisation can dramatically improve the ease of doing business in Nigeria by reducing transaction costs, shortening administrative timelines, improving certainty and allowing businesses to deal with government remotely rather than through repeated physical visits and intermediaries.
An e-Journal, updated on a predictable schedule and accessible through a public portal, would eliminate one of the most notorious sources of delay. In the UK and EU, trademark publication is fully digital; there is no technological reason why a Nigerian trademark should wait years for a printer, physical file or batch-processing cycle. The technology is neither exotic nor prohibitively expensive. What is required is the institutional will to deploy it comprehensively.
A fully digital Registry would also change the economics of corruption. When applicants no longer need intermediaries to discover where files are; when movements are automatically recorded; when payments are made electronically; when publication occurs according to a visible schedule; and when the history of an application can be tracked and audited, the space for informal payments and preferential treatment becomes dramatically smaller.
Digitisation will not eliminate corruption from Nigeria. No technology can. But it can remove many of the conditions in which corruption flourishes: opacity, unnecessary human contact, undocumented discretion, missing files, unpredictable timelines and information asymmetry. We should not simply digitise the existing bureaucracy; we should digitise it in a way that makes corruption materially harder to practise.
The Registry also requires administrative and financial autonomy. As a specialised function within government, it needs the capacity to reinvest appropriate filing revenues in IT infrastructure, cyber security, maintenance and specialist examiners. A modern digital system must be independently audited, continuously monitored and subject to measurable service standards. The public should be able to see, in aggregate, how many applications are awaiting examination, how long applications remain at each stage and where bottlenecks occur. Transparency should become a feature of the system, not a favour granted by an official.
There is also a strong case for strategic outsourcing. While the granting of a trademark is a sovereign act that must remain with the state, back-office functions such as scanning documents, data entry, digitising historical records and preliminary searches can be handled by properly supervised private technology partners. Such outsourcing must not create another layer of opacity; rather, every outsourced function should operate within the same digital audit trail, procurement rules, cyber security standards and performance metrics as the Registry.
Nigeria should also continue its movement towards full adoption of the WIPO Madrid Protocol. Allowing foreign investors to designate Nigeria through a single international application can make the Nigerian system more predictable and attractive to global businesses. It also places greater pressure on the domestic Registry to process applications within internationally recognised timeframes. The technology required to support this integration is already available.
The Federal Executive Council’s approval of the National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy is a commendable start. But policies do not protect brands; functioning institutions and enforceable rights do. Certificates cannot be reliably delivered by a system designed around opacity, paper files and discretionary bottlenecks.
Nigeria therefore faces a choice. It can continue patching a broken system: adding staff here, issuing another administrative circular there and periodically promising to clear the backlog, or it can redesign the system from the ground up, with 100% digitisation as the dividing line.
A genuinely digital Trademarks Registry will not merely make registration faster. It will make the process traceable, performance measurable and delay visible. It will reduce unnecessary human intervention, constrain gatekeeping and rent-seeking, lower the cost of compliance and return control of the process to applicants rather than whoever happens to possess information or influence within the bureaucracy.
That is why trademark reform should be understood not simply as an intellectual property issue, but as an investment-climate, governance, anti-corruption and ease-of-doing-business issue.
A country cannot credibly tell investors that their property is protected while requiring them to navigate a process in which the very proof of that ownership can remain trapped in administrative limbo for years.
As Nigeria competes with faster-moving neighbours and increasingly digitised regional IP systems, it cannot afford to be the place where brands go to wait. The Trademarks Registry should not be treated as a sleepy administrative outpost. It is critical economic infrastructure and part of the machinery through which Nigeria competes for global capital in the digitally-driven knowledge economy.
If government wants the world to believe that Nigeria is genuinely a modern destination for investment, it must make the country’s invisible infrastructure reliable, transparent and fast. It must also recognise that those who benefit from a dysfunctional system will not necessarily volunteer to fix it.
Reform therefore requires changing the system itself so that inefficiency is no longer a source of private advantage. It is time to clear the 2019 backlog, digitise the entire trademark registration lifecycle, remove avoidable discretion and ensure that “Made in Nigeria” is a brand protected as quickly as it is created.
-Okezie is a legal practitioner, chartered mediator and management consultant. He is also a co-founder and trustee of the Nigeria Diaspora Summit Initiative (NDSI).
