On 9 October 2026 the Nigerian legal outlet Law & Society Magazine published a commentary by lawyer Kachi Okezie criticising administrative backlogs and the lack of digitisation in the country's trade mark registration system. It is an industry commentary, not a new rule issued by the Nigerian trade mark authority. The author writes that while official guidance from the Trademarks Registry suggests a timeline of 12 to 18 months, practitioners report that applications filed in 2019 can still be awaiting publication in the Trademarks Journal. He identifies publication of the Journal as the primary bottleneck, points to a lack of transparency on application status and too many manual steps, and calls for digitising the whole lifecycle, including filing, examination, correspondence, payment, Journal publication, opposition, registration, certification and status tracking, with aggregate data published on how many applications are waiting at each stage.
The claim that applications from 2019 are still pending reflects reports from local practitioners rather than official statistics and should be cited with care. Another signal worth noting is that the author again argues that Nigeria should continue moving towards full adoption of the Madrid Protocol, so that foreign applicants could designate Nigeria in a single international application and the domestic Registry would be pressed to process applications within internationally recognised timeframes.
According to the list of Contracting Parties to the Madrid Protocol kept by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Nigeria is not yet a member, so foreign companies still need national applications to protect their marks there. The relationship between the Madrid System and the digitisation of domestic trade mark administration is becoming part of the local reform debate.
J&C recommends that companies seeking trade mark protection in Nigeria file national applications early and allow considerably more time than the official guidance suggests; instruct local agents to track application status and Journal publication regularly, and keep filing and payment receipts to prove the earlier application while the certificate is pending; and, in investment, licensing or financing deals, assess in advance how a mark still at the application stage affects the transaction documents and timing.
Source: lawandsocietymagazine.com | www.wipo.int
