The Managing Director of Stellarchem Nigeria Limited and immediate past Chairman of the Toiletries and Cosmetics (T&C) Group of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (M.A.N), Ikpong Umoh, has called for fusion of government agencies, doing similar functions in the country, to cut cost of production.
Umoh, who made the call on the sidelines of the T&C group event in Lagos recently, decried the negative impact of illegal demand of money by touts and government agencies in Lagos, stressing that such demands were weighing down productivity of Micro Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (MSMEs) in the state.
“SMEs operate in small localities, the first set of people who will come demanding taxation or levies are the area boys, the people in the streets, they come asking ‘Owo da? You will give us our own,’’ he narrated.
In his words: “We are not protected and then of course the local government will come ‘you’re operating in our jurisdiction why should you operate without giving us money? Give us something’. If you ask on what basis they are taking these levies, they can’t explain.
“The other day they came and said you’ve been operating in our area for quite a while now give us N500, 000. For what? I asked, no explanation. Perhaps the government knows but is looking away, that’s what they want.
“Then the state government will come, Lagos state that’s where we’re operating from, they say it’s the state generating the highest internal revenue, now consider these revenues how have they’ve been generating them, from my experience all parastatals of the state government have now metamorphosed into regulatory agencies.
“We have heard from S.O.N and National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA) they all say they have a mandate but the way they carry out the mandate is at the disadvantage of cosmetics industry.
“We gave some suggestions; can there not be a collapsing of those regulatory agencies doing similar things so that we can have one regulator?
Let them maintain their segments but we have only one regulator to deal with. Also is it not possible that between NAFDAC and SON, one agency makes the standard while the other implements to save us the problem of multiple taxation…
“Because truly speaking, all the regulations follow similar processes, and at the end we end up paying several sums of money for the same thing.
He underscored the contributions of the cosmetics industry to the economies of some countries in Africa.
“In most countries SMEs contribute as much as 60% to the Gross domestic Product (GDP) and let me also say that in Nigeria today it is the SMEs that can fix the multiple problems in the country such as; high rate of unemployment, school dropouts, poverty, etc. there lies the need to pay particular attention to the SMEs as the engine of growth.
“When it comes to the issue of money most SMEs are very thin on the ground so if we end up paying and paying a time will come when the manufacturers will no longer have money to procure raw materials for production.
‘So the agencies should understand that the SMEs play a crucial role in the growth of the economy.” Umoh noted.
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