Arewa Professional Forum Backs Digital Reforms, Urges Full Adoption Across Agencies

The Arewa Professional Forum (APF) is calling on Nigeria's federal government to accelerate the adoption of digital governance and paperless administration across all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs). The group believes recent developments concerning the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) underscore the urgent need to strengthen institutional systems rather than focus on assigning blame.

In a statement, the APF's National President, Comrade Auwal Muhammed, stressed that attention should shift to consolidating ongoing public service reforms. These reforms, driven by technology, are designed to prevent administrative lapses. The forum views the PFIPC issues as a critical wake-up call for government institutions to eliminate manual processes, which often lead to delays, weak documentation, and verification challenges.

The APF highlighted the significant achievements of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, Mrs. Didi Esther Walson-Jack, in transforming the Federal Civil Service through digital innovation. Over the past two years, her office has implemented ambitious digital reform programs, deploying systems like the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System, GovMail, and the 1-GOV Cloud Platform. These initiatives aim to modernize governance by replacing cumbersome paper-based procedures with secure digital platforms.

According to the forum, these digital reforms promote transparency, accountability, efficient record management, faster decision-making, and seamless inter-agency communication. They argue that a fully digitized system would create verifiable audit trails, strengthen institutional accountability, and improve public confidence. The APF maintains that expanding digital transformation across all MDAs will make procedural shortcomings easier to detect and prevent, ultimately bolstering trust in government institutions.

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It is precisely because of challenges such as these that the Head of the Civil Service has consistently championed the vision of a technology-driven and paperless Federal Civil Service.