In October 2018, Nigeria’s Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) launched the 50% reduction in the cost of Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria’s registration fee under the Business Incentive Strategy (BIS) initiative aimed at enabling MSMEs to formalize their businesses. The reduced cost offer ran from 1st October to 31st December 2018.
Seeing the massive response of Nigerians to this offer, the CAC deemed it wise to extend the offer further to 31st March 2019. People who took this offer were able to register their businesses at 50% off the normal registration fee.
Those who couldn’t make it had to pay the full cost of the registration from 1st April 2019.
For both instances, there was a reservation fee of N500.
The Vice President again graciously gave the directive for this recent extension which runs from 13th May through 13th August 2019. This is to enable small business owners who missed out during the first extension to do so now.
If you are a business owner, this is a golden opportunity for you to make your business a legal entity as there are many benefits of having your business registered.
Do not delay. Go over and register your business with the Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria.
If you need guidance, comment below and I’ll respond to every of your questions. Should you want us to help you do the registration as we did for others in the past, you can contact us for help.
Thanks for the information. However, CAC doesn’t give clear explanation on what is “actually” expected of registrants to fill or select under the ‘Nature of Business’ section yet there is VERY POOR customer care service.
The system queries your application via automated e-mail with no reply feature…you resolved to calling customer care service lines on CAC website for days before someone would pick…you report your challenge to the customer care personnel only for them to tell you that you should contact your ‘Pickup Centre’ by giving you a mobile contact to call and report your challenge; the Pickup Centre, in my case, is Alausa Ikeja Lagos…I called this Ikeja office (via the mobile contact given out by the customer care service centre in Abuja) for weeks on a daily basis, later every 2 days interval; the phone rings at every point in time, no response until today since beginning of May 2019!
1st Query was that my Nature of Business should appear in 3 lines. After fulfilling this, another query came that the Nature of Business must be strictly professional… There has been no place where CAC has stated clearly, in any of her publications, that Nature of Business for Business Name registration must appear in 3 lines (3 lines is ambiguous…not well defined) and also no place where what is meant by the phrase “strictly professional” is analyzed or defined for registrants/applicants to get full understanding of what is actually required of them here.
If the registration should be truly “online” as claimed, then I do not need to be going to a CAC office just to clarify what exactly I need to fill under the Nature of Business section… I should only need to appear physically at the selected CAC office when my certificate is ready for collection in order to submit necessary copies of required documents.
Many things relating to government agencies are often problematic in Nigeria; what is supposed to be simple always turns to be difficult and complex! I wouldn’t know if this is deliberate.
Abayomi, I quite agree with you about all the issues you have raised. It can quite frustrating going through this registration process especially if your doing it for the first time.
I think what I’m going to do is update this post with a step by step guide on how to go through the registration process. This is going save many people the unnecessary headaches of receiving queries upon queries.
When we first started doing this for people, some registrations took as long as three months before we scaled through, no thanks to queries we received upon queries.
There may be three things wrong with your application – they may not tell all three. It’s after you resolve the one they told you about, they then query and tell you the second reason. On and on the queries keep coming until you sometimes visit “your pick-up office” as you rightly said before you get things resolved. I really wish they stepped up their game on this registration process.
But now with experience, we’re sometimes able to finish a registration within one or two days!
I hope that you’re able to finish the remaining processes without further hitches. Wish you all the best.