Businesses are going insolvent in Nigeria- says BRIPAN

More businesses in Nigeria may be treading the way of insolvency, going by the position of Business Recovery and Insolvency Practitioners Association of Nigeria (BRIPAN).

Speaking at the association’s 2016 yearly general meeting, the president of BRIPAN Sola Oyetayo, said there was no reliable statistics yet on ailing businesses, because most Nigerian business owners do not reflect the right figures in their annual reports.

He said: ”While we cannot say the exact percentage of businesses going extinct in the country currently, we dare say that there are more companies going insolvent than the ones succeeding’”.

He added Nigeria is generally a difficult place to run a company, but if a more enabling environment is there, there would surely be a change.“This is where we differ from the developed world, when their business is collapsing, they voice out and cry for assistance, but here in Nigeria, except they stop paying workers’ salaries or owe staff for months, you will never know.

“This is what we have been seeing in some of our state governments too, owing workers’ salaries, and having a backlog of debts. According to him state governments need to beef up their efforts to create a more enabling environment that will attract foreign and local investors, and not just civil servants.

He added that when the environment is favourable with basic infrastructure like good road network, tax waivers for agriculture and manufacturing value chain, electricity supply and so on, investment will naturally come in.

“Our plan at BRIPAN is to assist governments and individual companies to revive their businesses through advisory, training, and professional insolvency services and there is no better time to do so than this,” Oyetayo said.

He urge small and medium scale businesses should endeavour to keep the right accounting records so that they can track their success or failure per time, and ask for professional help when needed.