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By Madu Obi
The popular Odera Building Materials Market in the heart of Awka, the Anambra State capital, was on Wednesday sealed by officials of the state Internal Revenue Service over non remittance of over N40 million collected from the traders by the chairman of the market.
The traders, who arrived early to start the business of the day, discovered to their surprise , that all the gates leading to the market, were sealed, making it impossible for them to access their shops.
Also, many traders who took delivery of of their goods from Lagos and other ports in the country, could not offload them. Some of the goods already offloaded littered the street, causing traffic gridlock.
Some of the traders who spoke on the issue said they were surprised when the state revenue officials told them that they were owing the state government so much money.
One of the traders claimed that all the over 500 shops pay N13500 every month, and wondered why their chairman has not been paying the money to government.
He said: "Every trader in this market pays unfailingly, but we did not know that our chairman is not paying our money into the government purse. Now, we are all suffering because of this lapse and the chairman is nowhere to be seen to explain what he did with the money we paid to him."
"The problem is that this chairman does not even have a shop in this market, but some people in government forced him on us.
As it stands, we don't even know when the market will be reopened. If you look around, all our customers are stranded and they can't even go to other markets because they have transferred money for their goods to us".
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