Magnus Eze, Enugu
The leadership of the South East Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (SECCIMA), has decried the imposition of cronies of government as leaders of various market unions.
SECCIMA President, Humphrey Ngonadi, who stated this in an interview with Daily Sun, yesterday, saying his leadership would push for friendly operational business environment that would translate to better Ease of Doing Business rating for the region.
“One of the things we are now witnessing is that there is no more election in our markets. The governments have made it such that it is party members that are managing the markets so that it will be easy for them to impose unnecessary levy on the market people because they are only caretakers. Market people don’t choose who they want anymore; there are no elections in our markets again. It is very unfortunate. Before the kind of government we have now, we were doing elections; traders in the market will choose people who will protect their interest, but we don’t have that now. We now have people who snatch money from the market people and share it with government. The money is not even used for the development of the market,” Ngonadi said.
He also condemned the multiple taxes imposed on traders by state governments in the zone and their revenue agents through touts as detrimental to businesses.
“Again, addressing the issue of multiple taxations is something we’ll be tackling. The problem today is that some of the agents both from the federal and state levels are the killers of the industry because they charge unnecessary money, they just charge you and they want you to pay for a service they did not render. Some of these things, I’ll get up and shout against it.
“You say you are environmental, you stay in your air-conditioned offices and you are collecting money from the commercial people while you have not removed any little waste for the person. Most of these taxes are killing businesses in the South East,” Ngonadi said.