By Omeiza Ajayi

The Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Administration has disclosed its ambitious drive to rake in at least N3 billion revenue from outdoor advertising by May 2020.

Director, FCT Department of Outdoor Advertisement and Signages, DOAS, Dr Babagana Adam, who disclosed this during a media interface, said his department had the capacity to generate more than the N500 million realised in 2019 but had been limited by touts and fake revenue agents bleeding the system.

According to him, the department is working on advanced IT-driven ways of revenue collection in order to plug leakages and prevent further evasion of advertisement rates.

He said: “We generated N500 million in 2019, but the plan is to hit the billion naira mark by May 2020. At the rate we are going, we will exceed that and probably we will be talking about N3billion revenue by May 2020. The problem is that the FCT has been in limbo for so long and practitioners were allowed to owe for too long, unlike places like Lagos where you dare not owe for one month.

“So, what we intend to do is to introduce quarterly payment plan so that agents and practitioners will not accumulate debts.”

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Debt recovery

The Director also revealed that the agency is working to recover the N1.9 billion outstanding debt being owed by 86 practitioners who ran advertisements on the 707 billboards across the city, adding that the agency may soon be delisting 45 practitioners who have failed to reconcile their debt profile with DOAS.

On the issue of double taxation on businesses, the DOAS boss said: “What we intend to do is if any of the Area Councils collects advert revenues directly from agents and practitioners, we will calculate all the monies they have collected through the back door then deduct that amount from the allocation due to them.

“That way, the area councils will realise that there is no point using their own resources to collect revenues themselves when they can just allow DOAS do the collection and give them the percentage due to them.

“DOAS as an establishment of the law does not do double taxation. If an agent claims to have made payment to Area Councils, we investigate and track such claims.

“But where the money goes to private hands with no evidence of such payment made into Area Councils’ accounts then such a business will have to bear the consequences, but where they have proof of payment we simply make deductions before paying allocations to that Area Council.”

Giving a breakdown of the sharing formula of advert revenues, Dr. Adam said the six Area Councils are entitled to 60 percent of the total revenue collected, while the FCT takes 40 percent.

“That 60 percent for Area Councils is further shared and AMAC gets the lion share of 40 percent. DOAS and FCTA only gets 40 percent of the total revenue generated, the Area Councils get the lion share.

“So what is the problem? For instance, of the recent revenue we generated, N305 million that was shared in January, AMAC got N73 million, the five other Area Councils got N22 million each, so you see, N183 million went to the six Area Councils. DOAS and FCTA only got N61 million each.”

Vanguard