Thursday 11th March, 2010
The Investment Bureau collects Business Premises Registration from every commercial business owning a premises in Cross River State. As part of the assignment we are trying to automate the Business Premises and convert it into a database for efficient management. To suggest further improvements in the business process and to get more insight we went on a field trip with 3 employees from Bureau responsible for the task. We were told that the staffs suffer from severe resource crunch and no vehicle or stationeries are provided to them. They use their own vehicle to go to these businesses and thus ignore a large no. of businesses which are far from Calabar. Additionally a total of 3 staff to man the complete severally inadequate. There are also instances where more than one area are managed by a single person. Also, they have to use their own paper to print forms and serve Demand Notice to businesses. We were also told that only a handful of business pay the Premises Renewal charges themselves.
Greg and myself hopped into the car and went with them to city outskirts to collect the fees. We stopped by some shop and the employees started collecting information and serving Demand Notice. Most of the business in this area (almost a village) were really small and the Registration Charge of 3000 NGN seemed too big for them, without any real benefit or incentives to them, apart from legal compulsion. I was wondering how many of these will actually pay the fee. The process also seemed inefficient. Once the Demand Notice is served, they have to go to a bank to deposit the fees and then take the teller to the Bureau to get the records updated. As it started raining we did not spend much time in the field and came back to Office. After coming back we started rethinking our strategies and noted the inputs from today for our future recommendations. Certainly, internet, business directory and online resources do not make much sense to them.
Evening, we went to a Chinese Restaurant, Happy Food, for Dinner. The restaurant had a nice red ambiance with good decorations. The food was also really good. And for the first time in Calabar had a good chilled beer.
On the way back we stopped by a food joint to get some pop-corns for later. As the popcorn was taking a lot time to pop, we sat down for more beer. The place seemed busy and happening with some good music playing. All of us had good fun there and took lots of pictures.
Drew organized a Nollywood movie night at the Hotel. The sound at hall was really bad and we could hardly follow the dialogues for "Royal Love". It seemed like a tribal love story set in a remote village. Honestly the movie was quite boring with lot of screaming, shouting and random scenes. However, all of us were taking turns to draw our own interpretations and it was good fun.
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