Marital Records Manually Archived @ Ikoyi Registry

In a world of vast technological advancement, records of marriages conducted in Nigeria’s premier civil marriage registry located in Ikoyi, Lagos are manually documented, a situation expert say could lead to loss of much treasured records, Nigeria Communicationsweek can report.

The Civil marriage is protected under the Marriage Act, Chapter 218 of Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 1990 (An Act to make provisions for the celebration of marriages).

There are two  types of marriage registries in Nigeria: the Ikoyi Marriage Registry is a federal institution under the Federal Ministry of Interior and covers all those resident in Lagos, South-South, South East and South West. All States have various Registries at the State and Local Government levels.

People exchange marital vows daily and it is shocking to know that the government is not taking full advantage of opportunities the smart office presents. Sadly, they do not even have a functional web portal.

A staff of the registry who does not want to be named told Nigeria Communicationsweek last week that: “We don’t have computers. Just look around our office, this typewriter we have here is archaic. It was left by the colonial masters. The colonial masters established this registry, they managed it and when they left, they left it to Nigerians.”

With advancement in technology, there are better ways the government could better the lot of the ministry after 52 years of the colonial masters’ exit from the shores of the country.

“In instances when people need to get something from their records, we search through our records, one after the other and this is tedious. The search may take a whole week, two weeks or four weeks,” said a worker at the registry who pleaded for anonymity.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that several letters have been written to the federal government for actions to upgrade its archival infrastructure without response.

Oyedokun Oyewole, president of Records and Information Management Awareness Foundation (RIMA), a not-for-profit organization sensitizing the public on the benefits of proper records management with IT applications, said under the prevailing circumstance, valuable documents could get lost.

“If they do not have proper document control and management platform it could lead to loss of time, hence retrieving of documents will be cumbersome. There is also the tendency of loss of records and documents.

“In addition, there will be a waste of manpower. Due to the volume of work they generate most of the workers will be most times engaged on sorting out one document or the other, thereby reducing productivity, because lesser time will be given to other issues,” said Oyewole.

He stated that to address the situation, the registry need to have ICT infrastructure in place. The management would also need to carry out a research on current activities; capture the current manual processing which can be transferred to electronic process.

“They can even develop a wed portal which has multiple advantages. First, it will reduce the crowed that come for verifications; hence people can at different places check position of their papers or applications. By so doing the Registry would have enhanced its revenue base, because people need to buy scratch cards to log on the portal,” Oyewole enthused.