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Traders blame leaderships on Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode markets closures

A cross-section of traders in Ogun State has blamed their market leaders for being responsible for the closure of their markets by the Ogun State…

A cross-section of traders in Ogun State has blamed their market leaders for being responsible for the closure of their markets by the Ogun State Internal Revenue Service (OGIRS) last week.

The OGIRS had shut some of the major markets in Ijebu-Ode and Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, over their inability to remit their taxes to the service after they had been served notices to such effect.

The affected markets included Kuto, Omida and Panseke in Abeokuta; Oke-Aje and Ita-Osu in Ijebu Ode; and Kara at Isheri, on Ogun State’s border with Lagos State.

The affected traders  put the blame of what they lamented was the “embarrassing” closure of the markets on their leaders, telling our correspondent yesterday that if those leaders had been paying to government coffers the dues they had been collecting from them, the “shame” would have been averted.

A meat seller at the Panseke market, who would rather protect his identity, and who claimed to have suffered huge losses from the closure, wondered why the leaders, referred to as Iyaloja (female market leader) and Babaloja (male market leader) failed in remitting the taxes to the OGIRS as they were being collected, adding he had paid his since about three months ago.

“Some of us have even started paying in bits. All these should have gone straight to the government account. But see what they have caused us now?” the meat seller said, adding that the leaders were nowhere to be found “as we arrived the market and found it condoned off.”

Also at the popular Kuto market, some traders claimed that the leadership of the market failed to let the government realize that, “some of us are civil servants and have had our taxes paid.”  They argued that paying again because they own shops in a market amounted to double taxation.

“The leadership is a disappointment. It was much later after we explained some things to the OGIRS officials that they allowed us to open shops. We are still going to look at this duplication,”  a school teacher who has a shop at the Kuto market told our correspondent.

The Iyaloja of Kuto market, Alhaja Isiwat Adewuyi, however, shifted blame back to the traders for, as she alleged, failing to heed earlier calls to clear their tax arrears, which is N1,600 yearly.

OGIRS Director of Informal Tax, Mr Dipo Shotande, had expressed concern over the rate of non-payment of taxes by traders in the markets.

Shotande explained that some of the traders, especially those at the Kuto market, had been defaulting in the payment of personal income tax for the past three years, adding that the agency had obtained a court order to enforce closure of the markets.

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