A businesswoman whose restaurant was allegedly sealed by the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) with customers and staff inside took to social media to lament.

The 35-year-old woman owns a restaurant with multiple branches in Abuja. She explained that her Gwarimpa branch was sealed by AMAC while she was away at a meeting.

When the officials arrived, demanding a “food handlers’ receipt,” she explained over the phone that they have it but it’s in her Wuse 2 branch. She said she begged them for patience to get the receipt to them but they refused.

According to her, they still went ahead to seal the restaurant with “customers inside for 4 hours and demanded 250,000 Naira.”

She also claimed that they come with different requests every day to frustrate her business. She complained that the government isn’t taking care of its citizens yet when business owners try to provide jobs for citizens, they are frustrated for it.

She explained that she has gone out of her way to do the right thing and register everything that needs to be registered for before she started the business, yet AMAC keeps coming up with new reasons to frustrate her.

She said: “Last year, I did the whole registration, we paid through REMITA then they keep coming every day. When we show them the receipt for the remitting thing that we did, they keep saying ‘oh that is not us, this is our own. Give us this’.

“This year, I said, OK. let’s do it the Nigerian way, give us everything that we need to pay in total then I will give you, go and pay everything and give me a receipt. He went, he did that, they gave us all the receipts.

“They said we have to do test for all the staff. I took my time, almost a hundred people, I took all of them, batch by batch to the hospital to do test. The results are here. That’s the food handlers’ result, we have it here, just wait for me to come, they shut down the place.”

She continued: “Why do we have to bribe you to do the right thing? It’s so bloody annoying that we have to go out of our way to constantly work to provide for people that the government is supposed to provide for but we take this responsibility and then you bloody want to frustrate me every single day, I’m just 35. I cannot have peace in doing business. What kind of country is this?”