The Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, has disclosed the launching of a digital postal system by the Federal Government through the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) with a view to improving mail delivery in the country.
The minister, who made the disclosure on his official X handle, laments that Nigeria losses an estimated N50 billion to N80 billion annually through missed and failed deliveries caused by poor addressing of letters and other postal packages.
The Minister, however, stressed that the problem goes beyond deliveries, affecting emergency services, security operations, financial services, businesses and government planning.
He maintained that for the country to work efficiently, we need to be able to answer one very basic question, that is where?, adding that the practical implications, include knowing where an ambulance should go during an emergency, where a business is located and where government should direct critical services.
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Under the digital postal system, every addressable building is assigned a unique 11-character alphanumeric postcode linked to its geographical location and the code is built through five levels, namely state, local government area, district, area and building.
The postcode belongs to the building rather than its occupant, hence it can remain with a property even when the people living or working there have changed; and it is also designed to complement, rather than simply replace, conventional address details by providing a standard digital reference that can be used across different platforms.
While urging Nigerians to find their postcodes, save them and start using them when sharing their locations, the minister maintained that “every Nigerian deserves to be found, every business deserves the chance to reach its customers, and every community deserves to be within reach of opportunity.
The system is GIS-enabled and covers addressable buildings in both urban and rural communities and the NIPOST’s official platform allows Nigerians to search for, save and share their postcodes.
The service also provides a process for requesting a postcode where a building has not yet been captured even as organisations will through it be able to integrate the digital postcode into their platforms and workflows, allowing different services to work with a common location reference.
The minister, who linked the new digital postal system to the government’s wider digital economy agenda of achieving a $1 trillion economy target by year 2030, stressed as the drive towards the target intensifies, “we must build the foundations that allow more Nigerians to participate, trade and prosper.”
He advised Nigerians to visit postcode.gov.ng, find their codes and begin sharing them with businesses, service providers, family members and others who need to locate them.
Earlier during the validation of the postcode model in June, the Postmaster General/Chief Executive Officer of NIPOST, Tola Odeyemi, had described the initiative as a machine-readable framework for identifying addressable buildings nationwide.
She explained that the postcode basically remained a framework used “to have a machine-readable standard location address for every addressable building in Nigeria”, adding that the system is not merely a postal reform but a piece of national infrastructure with applications in logistics, e-commerce, emergency response, financial services, security and public planning.
The platform is expected to improve emergency response, security, commerce and public service delivery, while tackling losses linked to poor addressing of letters and other postal packages nationwide.
