Our Government is anti-business

Is Lagos anti-business? Emmanuel Ijewere, a tax consultant in Nigeria reveals why Lagos is hostile to small businesses via an interview on Business Eye:

Doing business in Lagos is a traumatic experience. The impression you get from the local and state governments, coupled with some law enforcement agents, like the police, is that the state government does not want you to do business here. I will give you an example. In 2000, I went to a virgin land in Abijan village near Epe to build an abattoir. Before the abattoir was completed, I got a demand from the local government on various levies. They called them by different names: sign-board tax, road-use tax, development tax and so on.

My first question to the local government was, this is a rural area and you have an industry coming here, did you ever visit us to welcome us or even inquire how we can work together to develop this area?

Our effort would bring success to the people there because we would create jobs. The first contact we had with government was the piece of paper detailing all the levies to be paid. This is not all; if you have a vehicle with which you use to do business, from one point to the other, there will be toll gate where they will be collecting money. The traffic in Lagos is not bad enough, to now be subjected to this kind of problems. When you put all these together, it makes it look like Lagos is anti-business.

This observation is not limited to Lagos, really. What is described is a standard practice all over Nigeria. Unfortunately, it is the small businesses that carry the burden of those anti-business attitude…it’s about time reorientation classes are put in place to straighten things out, I think.