The public hearing on land use
charge amendment in Lagos state which held on Tuesday was greeted with mixed
reactions by stakeholders in the public and private sector.
With agitations by different
interest groups, the Lagos state house of assembly had proposed a hearing after
amendments to the land use charge law 2018 were made.
Ogunlana Adesina, chairman,
Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), had requested that the hearing be postponed.
According to him, copies of the
law and the proposed amendments had not been made widely available to the
public prior to the hearing.
“We can’t make any meaningful
inputs into a law that that has not been made available to us. What is worth
doing at all is worth doing well,” he said.
But over-ruling Adesina’s
request, Mudashiru Obasa, speaker of the house of assembly, said the issues to
be addressed were not new, having been in the public domain for several weeks.
He said of the 37 sections of the
land use charge law, only eight were actually billed for amendment and therefore
did not need amendment or postponement.
Following Obasa’s ruling,
Adeshina and members of the NBA who were present walked out on the speaker.
The speaker requested for
additional memoranda from members of the public, adding that they should submit
them to the house committee for consideration over the next two-week period.
Other groups from the private
sector including Estate Agent’s Association and resident’s associations
remained, making the hearing the highest in the history of the national assembly.
Also speaking at the proceeding,
Akinyemi Ashade, Lagos commissioner of finance, announced that “the executive
had proposed a general relief rate of 50%, up from the 40% of old.”
“Other reliefs included the
charge rate for commercial properties which had been reduced to 0.45% (from
0.76%) while industrial charge rate had also been reduced to 0.230%,” he said.
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