NIGERIA has slid further in the World Bank Global Doing Business Report 2012, as it ranked 133 out of 183 countries in the world. The Doing Business Project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 183 economies and selected cities at the sub-national and regional level. By gathering and analysing comprehensive quantitative data to compare business regulation environments across economies and over time, Doing Business encourages countries to compete towards more efficient regulation; offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each country.Head of Office and Country Representative of the Department of International Develop (DFID), Richard Montgomery, said at the presentation of the report in Abuja that Nigeria needs to urgently improve its competitiveness in the ease of doing business to attract much needed local and foreign investments.Submitting that 'Nigeria is either static or sleeping on a number of criteria,' Montgomery called on states to borrow a leaf from the reforms going on in Kano and Lagos states and improve their investment climates.In a reaction at the event, Minister of Trade and Investment, Olusegun Aganga, disclosed that the Federal Government was considering setting up a Business Competitiveness Council.Aganga stated: 'We need to first of all have the right investment policy. We need to make it a lot easier for businesses to register in the country; we need to make it easier to address the concerns of existing businesses in the country.'As part of that, we are going to set up a competitiveness council. We have never had it before. We will set up a doing business committee made up of different agencies to deal with the day-to-day problems which our industries are facing. We have another committee working with investors. Once we set all these in place, we will institutionalise what we do so that we don't retrace our steps backwards.'Meanwhile, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) is currently working with the National Assembly with a view to reviewing the Act establish the Agency to further empower it to impose stiffer sanction on oil companies shortchanging the country on its royalties and taxes.Executive Secretary of NEITI, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, stated this yesterday in Abuja at an interactive session with the media on the forthcoming NEITI national conference scheduled for February 9-10.Ahmed also disclosed that NEITI indeed engaged the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in audit reconciliation meeting on three occasions before the final draft of the 2011 audits was released.She described as 'paltry' the N30 million penalty currently paid by firms in the extractive industry for refusal or partial disclosure of information to NEITI.Ahmed stated: 'There is a prevalence of institutional resistance concerning obtaining information for audit process.'One of our major challenges is the inability to apportion appropriate sanctions. Even though Section 16 and 17 of NEITI Act have provisions for sanctions but our general view is that the sanctions are not stiff enough and therefore not enough disincentives for lack of compliance.'What we have been able to do is to include in the report entities that have refused to cooperate with NEITI. We have kick-started a reactivation of the penalties but even at that, a provision of about N30 million as penalty for non-compliance by oil companies and government agencies are grossly inadequate in view of the gravity of the offence.
Click here to read full news..
