Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, say that Nigeria’s Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System, scheduled for launch this year, will transform commerce, strengthen security and significantly reduce delivery costs nationwide.
Speaking at the National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System workshop in Abuja, Tijani described the initiative as critical national infrastructure designed to address Nigeria’s long-standing challenge of poor addressing systems.
“You can’t really get many things done without a digital postcode system and this determines whether crimes are solved at the right time, where threats are contained, and whether people’s lives are saved or not.
“What we’re here to introduce is not just a policy. For us at the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, this is foundational and core to what we’re building,” he said.
According to him, every building in Nigeria will be assigned a unique alphanumeric code to enable precise location identification, improve service delivery and support the country’s digital transformation agenda.
In her speech at the event, the Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Postal Service, NIPOST, Tola Odeyemi, said that the system would help tackle huge losses arising from inaccurate addresses while ensuring data privacy.
“Right now, in Nigeria, the cost of misdeliveries is anywhere from N50 billion to N80 billion because people are just running around not knowing where to deliver,” she said.
Odeyemi explained that the digital postcode system will improve routing, delivery pricing and logistics planning through more accurate location data.
She also assured Nigerians that adequate safeguards had been put in place to protect personal information, stressing that access to address data would be strictly controlled.
GIK/APA