The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) said yesterday it is working on a plan to lower the cost of registering small businesses from N10, 500 to N5, 500.
The Acting Registrar General of the commission, Lady Azinge Azuka Obiageli, said this in Abuja at a panel session during the Business Enhancement Roundtable organized by Daily Trust Board of Economists.
The registrar, who spoke through the commission’s Deputy Director, Public Affairs, Mr. Moses Adaguusu, said the ultimate goal of the CAC was to make business registration cheaper and its process simplified for small scale entrepreneurs to register their businesses.
“Registration is the very basic thing if you want to do business because you need an identity. This registration is as cheap as N10, 500; it is not up to $3,” Adaguusu said.
“The commission has gone a step forward for businesses that are very small. We are in the market now and there is a plan to step it further down to N5,500 just to encourage people to register because the benefits of registration are enormous,” he added.
The announcement by the representative of the registrar came on the heels of complaints by the audience, made up of mostly students and small scale entrepreneurs, that the cost of business registration in the country was still unaffordable.
Other panelists at the discussion were representatives from the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Nigerian Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (NASME), Nigerian Association Of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) and Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN).
The Chief Economist of the DBN, Prof. Joseph Nnana, said it was important for small scale business owners to register their business because it is the first criteria to obtaining a credit facility from banks.
