WHY SHOULD RENEWING A PASSPORT OR DRIVER’S LICENCE COST NIGERIANS HOURS OF THEIR LIVES?
A Personal Experience and a Question About Public-Sector Efficiency
By Otunba (Dr.) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo
Today 2nd of October 2026, I went to renew my Nigerian driver’s licence. expected a renewal. What I encountered instead was a vivid reminder of one of Nigeria’s less-discussed economic problems: the vast amount of productive time citizens lose navigating government processes that technology should already have simplified.
The Driver’s Licence Centre was crowded. Hundreds of people moved from desk to desk and office to office submitting documents, obtaining signatures, waiting for officials, completing one stage only to join another queue. Some were first-time applicants. Others, like me, were simply renewing licences they already held.
I was fortunate. Regarded as an elder statesman above 60, I received some consideration and completed the process in roughly three hours. That consideration, however, only deepened my concern. If I spent three hours despite preferential treatment, how many hours did the ordinary applicant lose? And more importantly: why should those hours be necessary at all?
The Question of Recapture
My greatest concern was being required to present myself for another biometric capture.
A Nigerian cannot ordinarily obtain a driver’s licence without already having his or her identity and biometric information captured. For an ordinary renewal in which the licence holder’s identity and particulars have not changed, the obvious question arises:
Why must government capture information it already possesses?
Interestingly, the Federal Road Safety Corps itself appears to recognise this problem. FRSC’s published procedures provide for “Bypass Capture” for eligible renewals. Under this system, an applicant who elects not to recapture can have the biometric data from the previous licence used for the renewed one.
The problem, therefore, may not simply be the absence of technology. It is also about how extensively and how consistently we deploy the technology we already possess.
The Economic Cost of Bureaucracy
Suppose 500 people pass through a busy licensing centre in one day and each loses an average of four productive hours. That is 2,000 productive hours lost in a single day.
Multiply this across licensing centres, states, and years. Then add the working hours of the government employees required to process repetitive paperwork that could largely be automated.
The true cost of bureaucracy is not merely what government spends running an agency. There is another, larger cost: the time government takes away from citizens.
A trader who spends five hours renewing a licence has lost business time. A doctor has lost clinical hours. A teacher has lost teaching or preparation time. An entrepreneur has lost productive hours. An employee may have lost an entire working day. Government must begin treating citizens’ time as an economic resource.
Renewal Should Not Be the Same as First Registration
There should be a fundamental distinction between a new applicant and an existing, verified licence holder. A new applicant understandably requires comprehensive verification, testing, documentation, and biometric enrolment. A straightforward renewal, however, should primarily answer a few questions:
* Is this the same person?
* Is the existing licence authentic?
* Has anything material changed?
* Is the person still medically and legally qualified to drive?
* Are the existing biometrics sufficiently current and usable?
If those questions can be answered electronically, there should be little reason to restart the applicant’s journey through multiple physical desks. Would Periodic biometric recapture may still be sensible after a defined number of years, significant changes in appearance, poor-quality existing records, or a security flag. But periodic recapture is entirely different from routine bureaucratic repetition.
What a Modern Renewal System Should Look Like
Nigeria already possesses much of the infrastructure necessary to do better.
An existing licence holder should be able to enter the licence number and NIN online, retrieve the existing record, verify personal information, make corrections where necessary, complete required declarations, make payment, and submit the renewal electronically.
The system should automatically determine whether fresh biometric capture is actually necessary. If it is not, the applicant should not be required to visit a capture centre.
If a physical visit is required for eyesight testing, biometric updating, or another legitimate reason the applicant should receive a specific appointment date and time. Not “Come to the office and wait until somebody attends to you.” An appointment.
Government already knows how many officials and capture stations are available at each centre. Technology can therefore determine approximately how many applicants can reasonably be processed every 30 minutes. That is basic queue management.
We Should Measure Waiting Time
Every government agency providing high-volume public services should publish a simple performance indicator: Average Citizen Processing Time.
If renewing a licence takes four hours today, management should have a clear target to reduce it to two hours, then one hour, and eventually in uncomplicated cases to a process completed almost entirely online. What gets measured gets managed.
Citizens should even be able to scan a QR code after receiving a service and answer three short questions:
* What time did you arrive?
* What time did you finish?
* Were you asked to make any unofficial payment?
Suddenly, government would possess real-time information about which offices are efficient and which are failing citizens.
Digital Government Must Mean More Than Putting Forms Online
Nigeria’s public institutions increasingly have websites, databases, biometric systems, NIN integration, and electronic payment platforms. That is progress. But digitisation is not simply taking a manual bureaucracy and placing parts of it on a computer. True digital transformation means asking a harder question: Which steps can we eliminate altogether?
The most efficient government transaction is not necessarily the one completed faster at the counter. Sometimes it is the transaction for which the citizen never needed to visit the counter in the first place.
My Experience Should Start a Conversation
This is not an attack on FRSC officials. Many officers themselves work under enormous pressure, processing crowds that the system continuously sends to their doors. Inefficient processes punish government workers as much as they punish citizens.
My experience therefore raises a larger question about public administration in Nigeria: How many millions of productive hours are Nigerians losing every year simply because government processes have not been redesigned around the value of citizens’ time?
Driver’s licence renewal is only one example. Passport renewal, vehicle documentation, land administration, permits, certificates, and numerous other government services should undergo the same examination.
For every process, government should ask:
* What information do we already possess?
* Why are we asking the citizen to provide it again?
* Which physical appearances are genuinely necessary?
* Which signatures can be replaced by electronic verification?
* Which queues can disappear completely?
Nigeria cannot talk seriously about productivity while accepting systems that unnecessarily consume millions of productive hours.
A citizen’s time has value.
A civil servant’s time has value.
Government’s time has value.
Tetttttchnology should help us protect all three.
Renewal should mean renewal—not starting all over again.
Signed, Otunba (Dr.) Abdulfalil Abayomi Odunowo National President, SCN SpeakUp Collective Nigeria
