MTN Nigeria, Nigeria’s biggest telecom company by size, was given the approval by the Nigerian government to deploy 202 billion of their capital to reconstruct the deplorable Enugu-Onitsha road.
This is what it means:
Enugu- Onitsha road has been a death trap since some of us can remember, but the woes of motorists and road users are about to come to an end as MTN Nigeria has finally come to justice.
This is how it will work. MTN will take 202 billion, 800 million naira from their working capital to hire a contractor in the mold of Julius Berger to go back and fix the road.MTN Nigeria will finance cost of reconstructing and rebuilding the road with the supervision of engineers from the federal ministry of work.
One may ask, how will MTN recover their money since they don’t run a charity organization?MTN pays what is known as Companies Income Tax (CIT) to the Nigerian government through the guys at FIRS every year.
Company Income Tax (CIT) is a tax imposed on profit of a company from all sources. The rate of tax is 30% of total profit of a company. Some profits are exempted from CIT provided they are not derived from trade or business activities carried out by the company e.g. Cooperative society.Last year, MTN paid 99 billion naira as Companies Income Tax (CIT) tax to the Nigerian government which was then shared as monthly allocation by the 36 federating states and Federal governments.What it means is that MTN would not pay this year’s Companies Income Tax (CIT) to FIRS and hopefully next year till they have recovered the last kobo they spent fixing the 110-kilometre Enugu-Onitsha expressway.
This template that MTN adopted and deployed is known as the road infrastructure tax credit (RITC).Nigerian government is broke and cash strapped so Fashola came up with this masterstroke to solve our infrastructure deficit which I think is working.The good people at Dangote Group adopted this same model, this template to fix the Apapa—Oshodi- Oworonshiki road in Lagos against their future Companies Income Tax.That Apapa-Oworoshinki road is wearing a new look today because of this ingenious initiative.
I travel on Onitsha-Enugu road often, often especially when I want to go and see my boss and benefactor, the chairman of Peace mass transit, Dr Sam Maduka in Enugu and it is always dreadful, atrocious to travel on the road.I’m glad that the atrocious experience will be a thing of the past very soon, as it is right to say:Better days are here for the road users of Enugu-Onitsha express way.
Chukwudi Iwachukwu
