VANGUARD
President Bola Tinubu is an accountant who, going by his training, knows a few things about taxation. Accountants know where to look in the books in order to make money. They also have the skill to hide figures, and what they don’t want you to see, you don’t see except you enjoy the benefit of their type of training.
As governor of Lagos State, Tinubu initiated and, indeed, imposed quite a number of taxations on Lagosians, a lot of them came in the form of multiple levies. They were the basis of the 2023 presidential election campaign claims of the APC that he raised the revenue of Lagos from a miserly monthly base of N600 or N700 million on assumption of duty in 1999 to a total gross of about N50 billion monthly when he left office in 2007.
These claims, including the related one that Lagos is the largest or second largest economy in Africa, have been fact-checked and found to be false even when it is widely acknowledged that there was a radical improvement in the revenue of Lagos during Tinubu’s time in office. The point at issue is that Tinubu’s tax reforms in Lagos brought much pain to Lagosians on account of the insensitive manner they were deployed. But because the increased revenue from tax also led to ancillary improvement in infrastructure, the pain they caused are prone to being brushed aside. For this reason, Tinubu prides himself on being courageous, a point he has again repeated since his government implemented the Muhammadu Buhari administration’s decision to remove the subsidy on petrol.
By May 29, it would have been one full year from the date Tinubu made the announcement removing subsidy from petrol during his inaugural speech. A lot of us who supported the removal then didn’t do so because we thought government has no obligation to the people or that subsidies on products, especially one produced by a people like Nigeria’s crude oil from which PMS is derived, are alien to governance. Much to the contrary, subsidy is at the corner stone of modern governance anywhere in the world, including the most rabid capitalist economy that provides subsidy to a wide range of sectors from agriculture and technology to consumer products like petrol.
The problem with the implementation of the subsidy regime, mostly on petrol, is that the entire process was corruption-ridden. Nigerians who needed it had no access to it except the big business owners that worked as middlemen. The helplessness the government displayed in putting things right in this regard was a major, if not the main factor, in many Nigerians supporting the removal of petrol subsidy last year. This was coupled with the fact that the economy was at the verge of bankruptcy. None of those who could potentially become president committed to retaining subsidy on petrol. They all promised to do away with it as soon as they could even if they have since found reasons to criticise the manner the Tinubu-led government has gone about it.
I repeat, Nigerians never supported subsidy removal because they thought they didn’t need it. It was because they could not see the impact of the subsidy regime in their lives. If anything, things have shaped up for the worse. Yet since last year, the Tinubu administration has not let up on the imposition of one tax or another on Nigerians even when they cannot see the promised benefits of petrol subsidy removal. The so-called floating of the naira and the unification of the foreign exchange markets have only served to worsen things. The little gains that appear to be accruing with the naira gaining strength against the American dollar have again been eroded while inflation is at a galloping rate. Even at that, the administration is not stopping. It continues to move from the imposition of one form of tax to another.
In the last few months, it has moved to increasing the tariff on electricity by its apartheid policy of “banding” consumers into those who deserve electricity and those who don’t. Its latest imposition is the Cybersecurity Act of 2024 which seeks to tax, with only few exceptions, all electronic transactions even where no profit is made. It’s like turning the office of the National Security Adviser that will have custody of the revenue from the tax into a cash cow. Given the outcry that has followed the announcement of this new tax on May 6, government has decided to suspend its implementation. But what ought to happen is that the act be repealed in its totality. Talk of reviewing it amounts to nothing.
It is grossly insensitive of the government to impose tax by whatever name on Nigerians at this time. Not until a bit of the promised benefits of previously imposed taxes are seen. But the Tinubu administration is determined to impose these taxes on Nigerians as if the heavens would fall if it does not do that now. Of what use are these taxes if the beneficiaries are long dead before the benefits manifest? This government seems to be pushing its luck too far and is courting trouble and social unrest in the manner it is stumbling from one policy misstep to another. I guess this is what the President calls courage, this horrendous insensitivity to the economic condition of the average Nigerian at this present time?
The Cybersecurity Act has been signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan for as far back as 2015. Was it for nothing that Jonathan failed to sign off on it until he was almost out of office? Or Was President Buhari blind for the entire eight years of his administration when he gave the implementation of that Act a wide berth? So, it is President Tinubu who in a sudden access of courage that saw it fit to dust up the Act in the name of amending and rushing it through the National Assembly in order to implement it just in a matter of weeks, with sanctions for financial organisations that fail to act on it beyond May 20?
This government’s conduct seems to be taking us back to colonial Nigeria, precisely in the wake of the World Wars when the regime sought to improve revenue through the imposition of tax on women. This resulted in riots in Aba, during the so-called Aba Women Riot of December, 1929. The same thing would play out in Abeokuta between 1946 and 1949, culminating in the abdication of the Alake. One hopes President Tinubu can learn some lessons from these episodes in history. He appears to be pushing too far and working too hard rushing in where angels feared to tread. That is not courage. It is foolishness.
