Entrepreneurship Regulation Bill: A Cage Under Construction -By Micheal A. Adeniyi

Micheal A. Adeniyi

From data taxation bill to business start-up regulation our government have lost touch of the people and reality on ground, or call it a season of caging as people call it. On 30th of November 2016 the Nigeria’s Senate passed a bill seeking to regulate entrepreneurship in the country.

The Senate, through its official communication account on Twitter, announced on Wednesday that a bill seeking to regulate enterpreneurship had passed a second reading in a country that haven’t really found its enterpreneural feet. The bill, sponsored by Senator Ganiyu.

Solomon, seeks to, among other things, have the institute of chartered enterpreneur to determine the standards of knowledge and skills to be attained by those seeking to be entrepreneurs.
In developed nations anyone can become an entrepreneur and this is what gave them an edge, worker don’t really rely on government employment, lot of people even resigned in less than 4years to pursue enterpreneurship.

Surely the idea of this bill is strange not just to me but to many Nigerians, being that entrepreneurship is just about starting up and it means running a business based on what the person thinks he wants to do, have knowledge in, or has the capacity to offer in exchange for money.

It is somehow hard to believe that the government would want to regulate an IT a Pure water or Snacks seller start-up enterpreneur, the enterpreneur they never provided funding for and how much has the government paid to assist this enterpreneurs. oh yes! Entrepreneurs usually begin theirbusinesses as start-ups and build them gradually to where they can over a period of time. Entrepreneurs offer a wide range of products, from goods to services, which drive the economy.

It is not clear how a chartered institute will be able to determine the skills required to run businesses by individuals who on their own chose to go into business and this bill if passed will automatically kill the flare for upcoming start-ups.

A World Bank study determined that moving from heavy regulation “can increase a country’s average annual GDP per capita growth by 2.3 percentage points.”

The Government and senate should stop focusing so much on taxes and devote more attention to deregulation. …Although it’s very difficult to measure the amount of regulation across the economy, there are more and more areas that are cause for concern. For example, the scope of occupational licensing, which economists mostly believe is a drag on growth, is startling, and seems to have no good reason behind it.…Another concern is environmental regulation…local development opponents are often able to use costly environmental reviews to block needed infrastructure. A third area is zoning. As the incentives for density have risen, zoning regulation has become an increasing burden on growth, Another is funding? No one is ready to loan a start-up entrepreneur nowaday, not even the Bank nor the government.

When people think about government regulation, it’s understandable that they focus on things that impact their everyday lives. Most of us, for instance, are irked by government’s war against modern life. Bureaucratic pinheads in Abuja think they have the right to plague us with regulations.
But what matters more is the way that onerous regulation throws sand in the gears of the economy, slowing growth and undermining job creation. And no matter how you slice the data, there’s no escaping the conclusion that Nigeria’s competitiveness is suffocating because of red tape and regulation from Abuja.

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