ABUJA: Nigeria has recorded a major governance milestone as the Federal Civil Service has officially transitioned to a fully paperless system, completing a nationwide digitalization drive across all ministries and extra-ministerial departments.
The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HCSF), Mrs. Didi Esther Walson-Jack, announced the development in Abuja during a press briefing, describing it as a decisive break from decades of paper-based bureaucracy.
According to her, all federal ministries and extra-ministerial departments complied with presidential and administrative directives to operate entirely through digital workflows as of the close of business on Tuesday, December 30, 2025.
This milestone marks a bold transition from a paper-based legacy bureaucracy to a modern, accountable, and digitally enabled public service, Walson-Jack said. Simply put, all ministries in the Federal Civil Service are now paperless.”
She noted that the achievement represents a significant step-in public-sector reform, strengthening accountability, transparency, institutional memory and service delivery, while aligning Nigeria’s governance framework with global best practices.
The HCSF explained that the paperless transition was the result of years of deliberate and incremental reforms driven by successive Heads of Service. She recalled that the digital transformation journey formally began in 2017 under Mrs. Winifred Oyo-Ita with the launch of the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (2017–2020), which identified digitalization as a core reform priority and introduced the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) concept.
The reforms were further consolidated under Dr Folashade Yemi-Esan through the Federal Civil Service Strategy 2021–2025, which expanded ECM into a broader digital content services framework.
“The focus moved beyond digitising documents to transforming how information flows, how decisions are made, how work is tracked, and how services are delivered across the public service,” Walson-Jack said.
She added that when she assumed office in August 2024, digital adoption across the Federal Civil Service stood at about 30 per cent, with only a few ministries operating partially paperless systems, making the current achievement a landmark transformation in Nigeria’s public administration.
