Minister of Trade and Investment,   Mr. Olusegun Aganga, has said that the ministry is working on modalities that will reduce the cost and procedures of starting a business and make it possible for both Nigerians and foreigners to start their businesses within 48 hours.

Aganga disclosed this during the first Doing Business Workshop in Abuja. He said that government was intensifying efforts at removing the bottlenecks associated with doing business in Nigeria by harmonising taxes collected by both local and state governments in line with the Federal Government’s efforts at improving the ease of doing business in Nigeria

He said, “We are working to improve the ease of doing business in the country. Our strategy to achieving this is by setting up implementation teams comprising the stakeholders and ensuring that these teams work on the sub indicators. We have started recording some success already.

“The Corporate Affairs Commission, an agency under my ministry, has started working on reducing the procedures, time and cost to start a business from an average of 36 days to less than five days, 77 per cent of income per capita to less than 10 per cent of income per capita and from nine processes to less than five processes in the medium term.

“Our long-term goal is to ensure that businesses can be started in this country within 48 hours. A number of state governments are also harmonising taxes and levies among themselves and the Local Governments in their domain to avoid saddling companies”, he added.

Aganga stated that the ministry had concluded plans to set up a competitiveness council which would be driven by the private sector to improve the competitiveness of the nation’s business environment.

He said, “We are working on improving the competitiveness of our nation. To achieve this, we are working with the private sector to set up a Competitiveness Council which will be private sector-driven and made up of members from the public and private sectors.

aglomar:

Great! Yahoo with almost a billion customers will verify your account within a few seconds while CAC takes weeks.

miky:

@faithinnigeria

Please stop talking about things you have little idea about. Please name one country where you can register your company/business online in two hours ,  I say this because two of my uncle here in the states have engineering businesses in the usa, it took the younger one about a month.( there was investigation, and checking of business premises, and lots of paper work on his actual paper work as Practicing engineer, he needed his PE certifications as well),  there is nothing long with the length in my opinion in Nigeria, just the procedure, and central location in Abuja which is inconvenient ,


Educate yourself, here in America( probably one of the most developed nations) it takes days to several months, depending on investigative purposes, no one registers company online in 2 hours!!!

http://www.sba.gov/content/5-steps-registering-your-business

http://www.ehow.com/about_5231230_long-register-company_.html

Wallie:

Well, you're only partially correct also. Registration of a company is different from actually having a company that can conduct business.

For the actual registration of a company, you can achieve that in about 30 mins if you show up in-person and you pay the $50 or so to expedite the registration. If you don’t want it expedited, it can take up to 8 weeks to get it done. Most people just pay the $50 or so dollars and get it over with.

To get a tax ID (EIN) will take about 2 mins to enter your business information online. Opening a business bank account takes about another 30 minutes for the bank to enter all your information to create your account.

But to actually run the business, the state and county your business resides in might have regulations that govern your type of business. For example, you would need licenses to sell food, beer etc. Certain licenses are very expensive or next to impossible to get because there are only a set number of licenses given per year.

However, if your business is not regulated or does not require a license, you can start conducting business with a fully functional business name and bank account in a couple of hours.

Lastly, different states have different rules but it shouldn’t deviate too much from what is posted above.

ose_o:

lets get our facts together. it does NOT cos $600 to register a limited liability company in Nigeria, You probably just overpaid your lawyer or whoever did it for you. Seconly if it takes you 3 months the fault is not from the government its from whoever you hired to register it for you. The longest I have ever heard of was 3 weeks.

I know companies which were registered and operational within 2 weeks. and im talking about companies that are running multimillion Naira outfits. Its all about the lawyers/agents you use. If you use someone reputable it should not take you more than 3 weeks.

If you want the process to be fast what you should do is provide a good number of alternate names when they do the search so you can avoid time wasted on back and forth.

ose_o:

lets get our facts together. it does NOT cos $600 to register a limited liability company in Nigeria, You probably just overpaid your lawyer or whoever did it for you. Seconly if it takes you 3 months the fault is not from the government its from whoever you hired to register it for you. The longest I have ever heard of was 3 weeks.

I know companies which were registered and operational within 2 weeks. and im talking about companies that are running multimillion Naira outfits. Its all about the lawyers/agents you use. If you use someone reputable it should not take you more than 3 weeks.

If you want the process to be fast what you should do is provide a good number of alternate names when they do the search so you can avoid time wasted on back and forth.

faithin9ja:

This is the type of colonial mentality that is affecting Nigeria and most of us are not even aware of it.

Aganga is trying to correct this anomaly.

In most developed (where we in Nigeria copied the intial idea of company registration from) it usually takes less than 28 hours to register a company and costs often less than $100 - in many countries you can register your company within a couple of hours online!!

In Nigeria, not only does it take anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months to register a company, you need a lawyer and it will cost at least $600.
Also you will be required to pay tax on your share capital, ie you are paying tax even though you have not even started business.

Banks/governments are equally complicit in this foolishness;

Banks will not lend you money until you have a limited company, for those who studied business will know that a limited company means your creditors cannot take any of your assets that are not part of the business, ie your share capital, but in truth the bank will still require all the directors personal assets to guarantee the loan, so why the need of the limited liability company?

No government will give you a contract until you have a limited liability company, the bigger the share capital, the bigger the contract you can apply for: but just like the banks the government department will still require the directors details and the share capital doesn't have to be paid-up, so what's the need?

ose_o:

lets get our facts together. i[b]t does NOT cos $600 to register a limited liability company in Nigeria[/b], You probably just overpaid your lawyer or whoever did it for you. Seconly if it takes you 3 months the fault is not from the government its from whoever you hired to register it for you. The longest I have ever heard of was 3 weeks.

gulfer:

Let the honourable minister work the talk. As we say, talk is cheap; only when it happend should we believe it.

Deep Soul:


Why must I hire a lawyer to conduct a simple name search and register it after approval?

CAC is just about the most frustrating Govt agency I know!!!