The Queue That Cost Nigeria Billions

By Jude Okala

How PEBEC’s Quiet Reforms Are Changing the Way Government Works
Every country has a national symbol.
France has the Eiffel Tower.
India has the Taj Mahal.
Egypt has the Pyramids.
Nigeria has…
…the queue.
We queue for fuel.
We queue for passports.
We queue for driver’s licences.
We queue for approvals.
We queue because somebody, somewhere, must sign a file before another person can sign another file.
It is such an ordinary part of our lives that we hardly notice it anymore.
But one day, while sitting in a café in Singapore, someone made me look at queues differently.
I had asked him what I thought was an intelligent question.
“How did Singapore become one of the easiest places in the world to build a business?”
I expected a lecture on economic policy.
Instead, he smiled.
“Because we hate queues.”
I laughed.
He didn’t.
“You think queues are about people waiting,” he said.
“They’re not.”
“They’re about economies waiting.”
That sentence followed me all the way back to Nigeria.
Because suddenly, I could see queues everywhere.
Not just outside banks.
Not just at airports.
Inside government.
An entrepreneur waiting three weeks for one approval.
A truck carrying imported raw materials trapped because three different agencies must inspect the same container.
A manufacturer unable to begin production because a permit has not moved from one desk to another.
A telecom company ready to lay fibre but unable to proceed because every state seems to have a different process, a different fee and a different interpretation of the rules.
We call these procedures.
Economists call them transaction costs.
Entrepreneurs simply call them frustration.
For years, we have debated why Nigeria struggles to compete.
We blame electricity.
We blame infrastructure.
We blame exchange rates.
We blame interest rates.
We blame politics.
Most of those arguments are correct.
But I have become convinced that another tax quietly exists in Nigeria.
It never appears in the national budget.
Nobody votes for it.
No law created it.
Yet every business pays it.
It is the tax called delay.
Delay is expensive.
Delay means a container spends another week inside a port.
Delay means a factory runs below capacity because raw materials have not arrived.
Delay means a supermarket pays more for inventory.
Delay means a family pays more for food.
Delay is inflation’s quiet accomplice.
The strange thing about delay is that nobody owns it.
Everybody contributes to it.
One signature here.
One inspection there.
One checkpoint further down the road.
One office that closes before your file arrives.
One process that has existed for thirty years simply because nobody ever questioned it.
Individually, each one appears harmless.
Collectively, they become an economic policy.
That is why I became interested in an institution with one of the longest names in government, the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC).
To be honest, I almost ignored it.
Nigeria has never suffered from a shortage of committees.
But this one seemed to be asking an unusual question.
Not, “How do we create another process?”
But, “Why does this process exist at all?”
There is a profound difference between those two questions.
The first expands bureaucracy.
The second challenges it.
As I dug deeper, another detail caught my attention.
Institutions do not reform themselves.
People do.
Behind every policy paper, every inter-agency meeting, every negotiation to remove an unnecessary process or persuade agencies to work together, there are individuals who quietly choose persistence over publicity.
In Nigeria’s case, much of that persistence has been championed by Princess Zahrah Mustapha Audu, the Director-General of PEBEC.
Her task, and that of the Council she leads, is neither glamorous nor headline-grabbing. There are no celebrations because a government service now takes days instead of weeks. No applause because agencies have agreed to coordinate rather than duplicate responsibilities. Yet this quiet, painstaking work is how institutions evolve and how confidence in government is slowly rebuilt.
One of the most striking things about PEBEC is that its greatest successes are often invisible.
Take our ports.
Most Nigerians have never visited Apapa or Tin Can Island.
Yet every Nigerian has paid for what happens there.
The traffic outside the ports was never just traffic.
It was an invisible tax.
Every truck delayed on the port corridor increased the cost of moving goods.
Every unnecessary roadblock extended delivery times.
Every manual inspection prolonged uncertainty.
Every scanner that was not working meant another container had to be opened physically.
The delays did not remain in Lagos.
They travelled.
They travelled into the price of cement in Jos.
They travelled into the price of medicine in Kano.
They travelled into the price of rice in Enugu.
Eventually, they arrived in the market where an ordinary Nigerian wondered why everything had become so expensive.
Then something interesting happened.
Government stopped asking how to manage congestion.
It started asking why congestion existed.
Roadblocks along critical port corridors began to disappear.
Modern cargo scanners were commissioned to reduce dependence on lengthy physical examinations and support smarter, risk-based inspections.
Agencies were encouraged to coordinate rather than compete.
None of these reforms looked dramatic.
A scanner.
A clearer access road.
Fewer unnecessary stops.
Better coordination.
They sounded almost ordinary.
But then I remembered my conversation in Singapore.
“Development is simply government respecting people’s time.”
Suddenly, the pieces fit together.
When a container leaves the port three days earlier, that is not merely a logistics story.
It is a manufacturer receiving raw materials on time.
A factory avoiding downtime.
A small business receiving inventory before running out of stock.
A family paying a little less for essential goods than they otherwise would have.
A day saved at the port travels remarkably far.
I found the same lesson in Nigeria’s digital economy.
For years, telecommunications companies faced inconsistent Right of Way charges before laying fibre-optic cables across the country.
At first, it sounded like another corporate complaint.
Then I realised something.
This was never really about telecom companies.
It was about the student in Maiduguri whose online class keeps buffering.
The software developer in Enugu trying to build a company from his bedroom.
The hospital in Lokoja depending on reliable connectivity.
The small business owner in Aba whose customers expect instant digital payments.
The cost of delaying one metre of fibre was never measured in metres.
It was measured in opportunity.
The countries we admire today understood this long ago.
Singapore respected an entrepreneur’s time.
Estonia digitised trust.
Rwanda simplified government.
Not because it looked good in international rankings.
But because every unnecessary process is a tax on productivity.
Nigeria’s reform journey is far from complete.
Businesses still face enormous challenges.
Infrastructure must improve.
Policies must become more predictable.
Implementation will always be the true measure of reform.
Yet perhaps we have spent too much time searching for dramatic solutions while overlooking the quiet revolutions happening beneath the surface.
Sometimes development is not about building something new.
Sometimes it is about removing what should never have been there in the first place.
A queue.
A roadblock.
A duplicated inspection.
An unnecessary signature.
The gentleman in Singapore was right.
The countries that become prosperous do not simply encourage people to dream.
They respect the time it takes to turn those dreams into businesses.
Maybe that is the lesson Nigeria is beginning to learn.
And maybe that is the most important economic reform of all.
Princess Zahrah Mustapha Audu understands that reform is not an event. It is a discipline.

About the Author
Jude Okala is a public policy and business environment reform practitioner with extensive experience in regulatory reform, investment facilitation and institutional transformation. He writes on governance, economic competitiveness and the role of public institutions in driving national development.