By Yinka Kolawole

Stakeholders in the manufacturing sector have lamented the crippling effect of the overlapping regulatory policies of government on businesses, and called for the adoption of good regulatory governance principles to unlock the full capacity of businesses and industries.

They made the call at Chief Executive Officer’s Breakfast Meeting of the Ikeja Branch of the Manufacturer Association of Nigeria (MAN).

In his remarks, President of MAN, Francis Meshioye, said while regulations were essential for safety and quality, the overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulations increase operational costs and ultimately hinder business growth.

He noted that Nigeria’s regulatory landscape was characterised by a multitude of agencies with its own set of rules and requirements.

“These bottlenecks have adverse effects such as operational inefficiencies, increase compliance cost, delayed production and risk,” he said.

Speaking earlier on the theme, “Harmonising Regulatory Compliance: The impact of overlapping regulatory functions on business operations”, the Director of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, (CPPE), Dr. Muda Yusuf, said the call was particularly important as this was not the best of time for manufacturers and investors in the country.

Yusuf said regulatory risk was one of the biggest risks that businesses had to cope with in the Nigerian economy.

This, he noted, could manifest as overlapping regulatory regimes with too many regulations, both sporadic and frequent regulatory changes and absence of dispute resolution mechanism between business and regulators have several cases of overlapping regulatory functions creating challenges for manufacturers, hence, the need for regulatory needs to be kept to the barest minimum.

He stressed that the regulators’ purpose and objectives should be clearly defined and communicated to the regulator, the regulated and the general public.

He said stakeholders should be able to predict with a high degree of confidence what decision a regulator is likely to make in a particular circumstance.