Through the Smart State initiative, the Ministry is in the process of convincing State Governors and the relevant authorities at the state level to agree to eliminate multiple-taxation and adopt measures that will remove arbitrary charges and enhance telecom service delivery. Other benefits to this agreement, include standardise pricing on right of way, taxes and levies, thereby increasing the predictability of cost for infrastructure development in the ICT sector. The agreement will reduce cost of network deployment and shorten the period for application processing. Lagos state has hearkened to the call of the Ministry. A landmark agreement has thus been brokered between the Lagos state government and service providers. The Agreement with Lagos State resulted in the cost of the ROW being slashed by 85% (N3000.00 only to N500.00 only). An assessment of the deployment of ICT infrastructure revealed that almost 70 percent of deployment cost was spent on processing ROW; taxes and levies on infrastructure, which makes the landmark agreement with the Lagos State Government even more significant. Bayelsa state has also agreed to slash cost of RoW by 50%. The state which has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry has also agreed to set up of a single agency that will administer the collection of all taxes and levies in Bayelsa
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 01:08:47 +0000