By Eromo Egbejule, courtesy of The Africa Report.
Known for its traffic snarls and entrepreneurial dynamism, Lagos is a megalopolis with mega-needs.
Nigeria’s smallest state is also its most populous. The country’s top economic performer, Lagos is bursting at the seams as more people arrive in search of opportunity, creating demand for roads and electricity, amongst other things.
Long seen as a bastion of the opposition, Lagos has not received the investment that it needs to grow in a well-planned way, despite the fact that it generates more tax revenue per capita than any other Nigerian state.
Lagos’s population swelled to more than 20 million in 2019. This number is projected to double by 2050, and the mega-city’s problems could equally double.
Babajide Sanwo-Olu of President Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) became governor of Lagos State in May 2019. With Lagos sorely needing solutions to combat its infrastructure problems, he unveiled the Lagos Innovation Master Plan and also announced a N250m ($685,000) tech fund for research and development in the state in December 2019.
The master plan seeks to make Lagos a ‘smart’ city and to provide the foundation for the growing tech sector based in Yaba to grow.
Planning priorities
In his 2019 inauguration speech as Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu named transportation, power, health and education as priorities for his term. As part of its plan to increase commuter options, Sanwo-Olu’s government has announced that the first phase of the light rail network will be operational in 2021.
Bids for the long-touted 38km-long 4th Mainland Bridge to connect both island and mainland districts also opened in December 2019. But experts say the government still needs to take innovative approaches to addressing the major infrastructural challenges.
“For example, sewage will require a decentralised approach focused on empowering the local government system […] and providing community sewers,” says the University of Lagos’s Taibat Lawanson. “Mass transit will require a more centralised approach that is private sector-led, albeit supported with government subsidies.”
Transportation minister and former governor Babatunde Fashola, whose stint as power minister failed to bridge the energy deficit, initiated five independent power projects (IPPs) to boost the power supply to government establishments.
A sixth, 12MW one was switched on at the Lekki Free Trade Zone. Keen to make his own mark, Akinwunmi Ambode set up the Light Up Lagos initiative, which did little to boost the state’s electricity situation.
His successor has announced plans to resuscitate that initiative, beginning with a proposed partnership with Siemens and the expansion of another IPP. More IPPs could emerge, powered by Lagos’s own mini-grid using pipeline gas supply, now that it has discovered oil and gas deposits.
However, despite all its predilections for grandeur, Lagos has no proper sewage, drainage or mass transit systems, triggering complications during floods and traffic surges. Unlike the Pretoria-Gauteng metro service in South Africa, there is no interstate rail connecting the metropolis with satellite towns and the city of Ibadan, 129km away.
There is a running joke that a Lagosian can land in London after a six-hour flight in the same time it takes his neighbour to go across the mega-city on a Friday evening.
Evictions of urban poor
With tony projects like Eko Atlantic adding space to the city for the country’s richest inhabitants, Lagos’s poorer citizens argue that they are being sidelined in the city’s modernisation plans. So far, Sanwo-Olu has followed in the footsteps of his predecessors.
This January, a team of naval personnel and soldiers evicted residents of the popular Tarkwa Bay beach community. It was the latest round of recurring evictions since the 1990 exercise in the shantytown of Maroko, part of what is today’s highbrow Oniru and Lekki neighbourhoods.
The communities provided shelter for low-income earners grappling with survival in the absence of state housing programmes. Lagos has not had an efficient public housing policy since the Lateef Jakande administration (1979-1983)..
Jakande, who was also a former housing minister, supervised the building of over 30,000 housing units, mostly low-cost estates. He also initiated a metro line project that was halted by the military government that came to power in the 1983 palace coup, headed by a certain Muhammadu Buhari.
Sanwo-Olu also recently banned the use of the ubiquitous okada motorcycles and tricycles, which rose as stop-gap solutions to the endless traffic jams and dysfunctional mass transit system. This, despite public meetings with representatives of various ride-hailing start-ups.
“Both the federal and Lagos state government since 1999 have governed using a business/neoliberal model, forgetting that over 60% of the population live below the poverty line,” says Taibat Lawanson, associate professor of urban regional planning and co-director of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos. “The only one urban planning solution that comes to mind in which both poor and middle-class Lagosians in many parts of the city have been able to benefit is the BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] system, though it has been plagued by many challenges.”
“Lagos can’t become a mega-city by violently displacing the poor,” concurs Ugochukwu Ikeakor, a Lagos-based policy analyst. “Very soon Lekki will turn into Apapa [with the same chaos]. All thanks to Dangote refinery. We don’t have a rail line that works, our roads are in a terrible state. Lagos is a dysfunctional city and it’s not the fault of the urban poor.”
The plans for the mega-refinery highlight the need for joined-up planning at the state level so that companies and workers both have the infrastructure they need.
Since the return of democracy in 1999, Lagos has effectively been ruled by the same party – the APC, its current iteration, evolved from the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Action Congress (AC). Ahmed Bola Tinubu, a political godfather and current APC national leader, won two terms between 1999 and 2007 before supporting a series of protégés as his successors.
Babatunde Fashola, now minister of works and housing, is seen as the brightest of them all. He initiated a series of projects in a bid to keep crime low during his tenure as governor (2007-2015). One publication labelled him ‘the man who tamed Nigeria’s most lawless city’.
But even he fell short in some areas: a $1.2bn, seven-line light rail project originally conceived under Tinubu in the early 2000s and initiated early in Fashola’s second term remains unfinished.
Transport commissioner Frederic Oladeinde says that more alternatives are needed:“Building more roads will not solve our problems because people will continue to buy new cars; the solution to our problems is creating more options.”
Cutting ribbons regardless
Bureaucratic and other hurdles often stop projects from making progress.
With his exit already on the cards, Akinwunmi Ambode, who had built a number of overhead bridges and intrastate access roads during his tenure (2015-2019), invited President Muhammadu Buhari to cut the ribbons for the 10-lane road to the international airport and a multi-level transport interchange just after the elections, even though both projects were still under construction.
It was the president’s second visit in a year, after the commissioning of a mega bus terminal, which has scarcely been used since.
Since Fashola’s exit as the state’s chief executive governance standards have slipped. Ahead of the 2015 general elections, party supporters were convinced that if both Lagos and Abuja could be held by the same ruling party for the first time since the return of democracy in 1999 it would be an alignment for accelerated development.
Fashola was named infrastructure minister in Buhari’s cabinet but that has failed to translate into major projects benefiting Lagos.
His gubernatorial successor Ambode’s legacy was tarnished by the spectacular fumbling of sanitation in the mega-city after awarding a multi-billion naira contract to untested company Visionscape.
It was one of a list of unforgivable sins that led party elders to rally the troops around Sanwo-Olu, another Tinubu protégé, at the party’s primaries, leading to the incumbent’s defeat.
Since Ambode lost the governorship primaries in 2018, Visionscape has been forgotten, replaced by the Lagos Waste Management Authority and its Private Sector Participation operators. But the mountain of filth in Lagos will take a while to clean up.
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email info@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
SARS is Changing the Tax Filing Season Due to the Coronavirus
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has outlined changes to the coming tax filing season due to the impact of the coronavirus.
In a presentation recently, SARS commissioner Edward Kieswetter said that the season will be comprised of three phases with a number of key changes being made.
Below he outlined the phases and what will be expected of taxpayers and companies over each period.
Phase 1 – Employer filing
15 April 2020 – 31 May 2020
Kieswetter said that compliance by employers in respect of payroll taxes (PAYE) is very important, and that there will be a renewed focus at SARS to ensure that all employers are fully compliant in terms of their filing and payment obligations.
“We expect all employers to fully comply because this ensures a much lower burden of compliance for their employees in respect of their filing obligations.
“Employers are legally appointed agents on behalf of SARS. We remind employers that it is a criminal offence to collect income tax from their employees, and not pay this over to SARS.
“We also appeal to employers, along with other providers of third-party information to fulfil this requirement by the end of May 2020.”
Kieswetter said that third-party Information allows us to use data modelling and artificial intelligence to perform the final assessment of all standard taxpayers and provide the majority of individual taxpayers with a seamless filing experience.
Third-party providers include:
Phase 2 – Tax file updates1 June – 31 August 2020
During this period taxpayers are requested to engage with SARS to ensure that their tax files are up to date, in terms of general hygiene checks, banking details, address changes, Kieswetter said.
He added that most of these tasks can be completed online.
“All outstanding third party information will also be followed up during this period to ensure the highest level of data integrity. Third-party data providers, including employers, who remain wilfully non-compliant will be charged criminally during this period.
“During this phase a significant number of taxpayers will receive auto-assessments and given an opportunity to confirm their acceptance of the assessment outcome according to SARS.”
Kieswetter added that during phase 2, individual taxpayers who are required to file but have not been auto-assessed may file early via online facilities if their employers and other third-party data providers are fully complaints (which includes no PAYE debt without a proper and secure deferment arrangement).
Individuals who are not required to file will be informed, he said.
Phase 3 – Employee filing
1 September – 31 January 2021
Kieswetter said that during this phase, individuals who are required to file will be reminded.
“Individuals who are non-provisional taxpayers or have not accepted the outcome of an auto-assessment are required to file as from 1 September through to 16 November 2020 and encouraged to file using our on-line channels to minimise visits to our offices.
“Individuals who are non-provisional taxpayers, who make use of our Branch facility has until the 22 October 2020 to file.
“Provisional Taxpayers who have not accepted the outcome of an auto-assessment are required to file when they are ready but not later than 31 January 2021.”
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email info@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
South Africa: You Can Now Move House Under Level 4 Lock-down Rules, But Only Until 7 June
South Africans can move house again, as long as the country does not go back up to Alert Level 5.
Under regulations published by cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, people and their household effects may move around South Africa on a once-off basis – even across provincial lines.
But there are terms and conditions – including that any move must happen by 7 June.
The rules are intended to allow people to move when they have entered a new lease agreement, either before or during lockdown, or where they have bought new homes and the transfer of the property has already gone through.
In those cases, once-off relocation is allowed. But there are strict limits.
You may only move “household furniture and effects” as required to move into a new home.
For now, at least, there is also a specific window for moves, similar to the just-closed window for those who needed to change provinces to go back to work. That window is open from Thursday, 7 May, and will close again on 7 June if the lockdown level is not relaxed or new rules are not issued before then.
If you are moving between towns, you’ll also need permission from the police. Travel “across provincial, metropolitan or district boundaries” require a permit issued by a station commander, Dlamini-Zuma said.
You need to have that permit, plus a signed lease or transfer documents to hand during travel.
(Compiled by Phillip de Wet).
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email info@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
New Fines for Breaking South Africa’s Lock-down Laws
The South African Judiciary has published a series of directives which outline how much citizens will have to pay in ‘admission of guilt’ fines if they are found to breach the country’s lockdown rules.
The South African Police Service may give a person, who has been arrested on suspicion of a less serious crime, an option to pay an admission of guilt fine.
Such a fine allows a person to admit guilt for a less serious offence without having to appear in court. This prevents an unnecessary overload of the court system.
It is meant to resolve less serious matters quickly where an accused person accepts responsibility for having committed a minor offence.
The directives are based on provincial and magistrate districts, and are in line with the new level 4 lockdown regulations which were introduced from 1 May.
The directives also provide on how the court plans to deal with these cases, with KZN indicating that it will reserve judgement for breaches it deems trivial.
While the fines differ between regions, the below table provides an idea of what you can expect to pay based on the directive for Tshwane.
Not all regions have published directives, but details are available for these areas:
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email info@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].
Lagos: What Does it Need to Keep Growing?
By Eromo Egbejule, courtesy of The Africa Report.
Known for its traffic snarls and entrepreneurial dynamism, Lagos is a megalopolis with mega-needs.
Nigeria’s smallest state is also its most populous. The country’s top economic performer, Lagos is bursting at the seams as more people arrive in search of opportunity, creating demand for roads and electricity, amongst other things.
Long seen as a bastion of the opposition, Lagos has not received the investment that it needs to grow in a well-planned way, despite the fact that it generates more tax revenue per capita than any other Nigerian state.
Lagos’s population swelled to more than 20 million in 2019. This number is projected to double by 2050, and the mega-city’s problems could equally double.
Babajide Sanwo-Olu of President Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) became governor of Lagos State in May 2019. With Lagos sorely needing solutions to combat its infrastructure problems, he unveiled the Lagos Innovation Master Plan and also announced a N250m ($685,000) tech fund for research and development in the state in December 2019.
The master plan seeks to make Lagos a ‘smart’ city and to provide the foundation for the growing tech sector based in Yaba to grow.
Planning priorities
In his 2019 inauguration speech as Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu named transportation, power, health and education as priorities for his term. As part of its plan to increase commuter options, Sanwo-Olu’s government has announced that the first phase of the light rail network will be operational in 2021.
Bids for the long-touted 38km-long 4th Mainland Bridge to connect both island and mainland districts also opened in December 2019. But experts say the government still needs to take innovative approaches to addressing the major infrastructural challenges.
“For example, sewage will require a decentralised approach focused on empowering the local government system […] and providing community sewers,” says the University of Lagos’s Taibat Lawanson. “Mass transit will require a more centralised approach that is private sector-led, albeit supported with government subsidies.”
Transportation minister and former governor Babatunde Fashola, whose stint as power minister failed to bridge the energy deficit, initiated five independent power projects (IPPs) to boost the power supply to government establishments.
A sixth, 12MW one was switched on at the Lekki Free Trade Zone. Keen to make his own mark, Akinwunmi Ambode set up the Light Up Lagos initiative, which did little to boost the state’s electricity situation.
His successor has announced plans to resuscitate that initiative, beginning with a proposed partnership with Siemens and the expansion of another IPP. More IPPs could emerge, powered by Lagos’s own mini-grid using pipeline gas supply, now that it has discovered oil and gas deposits.
However, despite all its predilections for grandeur, Lagos has no proper sewage, drainage or mass transit systems, triggering complications during floods and traffic surges. Unlike the Pretoria-Gauteng metro service in South Africa, there is no interstate rail connecting the metropolis with satellite towns and the city of Ibadan, 129km away.
There is a running joke that a Lagosian can land in London after a six-hour flight in the same time it takes his neighbour to go across the mega-city on a Friday evening.
Evictions of urban poor
With tony projects like Eko Atlantic adding space to the city for the country’s richest inhabitants, Lagos’s poorer citizens argue that they are being sidelined in the city’s modernisation plans. So far, Sanwo-Olu has followed in the footsteps of his predecessors.
This January, a team of naval personnel and soldiers evicted residents of the popular Tarkwa Bay beach community. It was the latest round of recurring evictions since the 1990 exercise in the shantytown of Maroko, part of what is today’s highbrow Oniru and Lekki neighbourhoods.
The communities provided shelter for low-income earners grappling with survival in the absence of state housing programmes. Lagos has not had an efficient public housing policy since the Lateef Jakande administration (1979-1983)..
Jakande, who was also a former housing minister, supervised the building of over 30,000 housing units, mostly low-cost estates. He also initiated a metro line project that was halted by the military government that came to power in the 1983 palace coup, headed by a certain Muhammadu Buhari.
Sanwo-Olu also recently banned the use of the ubiquitous okada motorcycles and tricycles, which rose as stop-gap solutions to the endless traffic jams and dysfunctional mass transit system. This, despite public meetings with representatives of various ride-hailing start-ups.
“Both the federal and Lagos state government since 1999 have governed using a business/neoliberal model, forgetting that over 60% of the population live below the poverty line,” says Taibat Lawanson, associate professor of urban regional planning and co-director of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos. “The only one urban planning solution that comes to mind in which both poor and middle-class Lagosians in many parts of the city have been able to benefit is the BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] system, though it has been plagued by many challenges.”
“Lagos can’t become a mega-city by violently displacing the poor,” concurs Ugochukwu Ikeakor, a Lagos-based policy analyst. “Very soon Lekki will turn into Apapa [with the same chaos]. All thanks to Dangote refinery. We don’t have a rail line that works, our roads are in a terrible state. Lagos is a dysfunctional city and it’s not the fault of the urban poor.”
The plans for the mega-refinery highlight the need for joined-up planning at the state level so that companies and workers both have the infrastructure they need.
Since the return of democracy in 1999, Lagos has effectively been ruled by the same party – the APC, its current iteration, evolved from the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and Action Congress (AC). Ahmed Bola Tinubu, a political godfather and current APC national leader, won two terms between 1999 and 2007 before supporting a series of protégés as his successors.
Babatunde Fashola, now minister of works and housing, is seen as the brightest of them all. He initiated a series of projects in a bid to keep crime low during his tenure as governor (2007-2015). One publication labelled him ‘the man who tamed Nigeria’s most lawless city’.
But even he fell short in some areas: a $1.2bn, seven-line light rail project originally conceived under Tinubu in the early 2000s and initiated early in Fashola’s second term remains unfinished.
Transport commissioner Frederic Oladeinde says that more alternatives are needed:“Building more roads will not solve our problems because people will continue to buy new cars; the solution to our problems is creating more options.”
Cutting ribbons regardless
Bureaucratic and other hurdles often stop projects from making progress.
With his exit already on the cards, Akinwunmi Ambode, who had built a number of overhead bridges and intrastate access roads during his tenure (2015-2019), invited President Muhammadu Buhari to cut the ribbons for the 10-lane road to the international airport and a multi-level transport interchange just after the elections, even though both projects were still under construction.
It was the president’s second visit in a year, after the commissioning of a mega bus terminal, which has scarcely been used since.
Since Fashola’s exit as the state’s chief executive governance standards have slipped. Ahead of the 2015 general elections, party supporters were convinced that if both Lagos and Abuja could be held by the same ruling party for the first time since the return of democracy in 1999 it would be an alignment for accelerated development.
Fashola was named infrastructure minister in Buhari’s cabinet but that has failed to translate into major projects benefiting Lagos.
His gubernatorial successor Ambode’s legacy was tarnished by the spectacular fumbling of sanitation in the mega-city after awarding a multi-billion naira contract to untested company Visionscape.
It was one of a list of unforgivable sins that led party elders to rally the troops around Sanwo-Olu, another Tinubu protégé, at the party’s primaries, leading to the incumbent’s defeat.
Since Ambode lost the governorship primaries in 2018, Visionscape has been forgotten, replaced by the Lagos Waste Management Authority and its Private Sector Participation operators. But the mountain of filth in Lagos will take a while to clean up.
For information as to how Relocation Africa can help you with your Mobility, Immigration, Research, Remuneration, and Expat Tax needs, email info@relocationafrica.com, or call us on +27 21 763 4240.
Sources: [1], [2]. Image sources: [1], [2].