If Uncle Jeremiah had been alive in this era, he may have had second thoughts about naming his second book as “Lamentations”. As an empathetic person, after seeing the torrent of complaints by Nigerians, maybe his own book would have been the Book of Less Worrisome Jewish Lamentations. But poor jokes asides, Nigerian social media spaces and even offline conversations these days tend to highlight a common pain point around taxes, just like the irreverent sapa, attempting to strangulate people.
Before we proceed, we may want to get something out of the way. For decades, we have seen “international entities” flagging Nigeria’s low tax to GDP ratio as an anomaly to be corrected by escalating tax receipts. While there may be some wisdom in seeking ways to improve tax revenues, what these advisers fail to mention is that in the countries being used as a benchmark, the populace despite enjoying better living conditions, still cry about paying the bulk of their income in direct and indirect taxes.
Back to Nigeria where several government entities seem on a prowl to “increase internally generated revenue” with little regard for the ability of the economy to absorb additional taxes, the breakfast is being served to almost everyone. Now, I understand that the government is “technically broke” and needs to raise money, but like Henri Fayol said, “with authority comes responsibility”. The authority to enforce taxes comes with a responsibility for diligent use of such taxes and for the government to seek the overall good of the populace. However, while our leaders understand the “authority” side, “responsibility” is where they draw the line. The next three discussion points explain this.
Firstly, there are two ways to balancing budgets – increase revenue and/or cut costs. There is little information in the public domain about any move by the government to cut costs, even for easy wins like over-bloated contracts or non-essential items. While citizens are rightly told to endure the pain for a better future, the government appears to be exempted from any form of endurance. One challenge with this is that no amount of increase in revenue would be enough because as more funds come in, wastages would go up in step, thereby repeating the cycle by requiring more funds to stay afloat.
Still on wastages, despite complaints about the budgets of many federal agencies being padded with poorly designed “constituency projects” unrelated to their operational mandate, no government official has attempted to explain why this occurs, nor made any corrective suggestions. Clearly, many of the padded projects have the allotted sums arbitrarily assigned without any considerations around cost optimisation or value engineering. And because the executing agencies are swimming outside their areas of competence, they are unlikely to identify unconscionable cost elements in commercial proposals submitted by contractors. We have even ignored the clear waste incurred when an agency based in Sokoto is tasked with executing a project in Calabar.
Secondly, there is the issue of transparency. We saw in this country where a state government went to court to argue that a civil society organisation did not have the right to ask how it spent public money. The same mindset of “we have the right to collect taxes from you, but you should not ask how we use the money” appears prevalent across the entire country. Unfortunately, this goes beyond issues of money because we have a wider problem with government officials seeing themselves as “lords” rather than as “servants” of the people who have been tasked with managing our common patrimony. Transparency also means that each year, the government should report on which capital projects were executed (cash-backed) in the previous year, so Nigerians are better informed rather than seeing the same single-year projects appearing repeatedly across different years’ budgets.
Thirdly, the responsibility to communicate responsibly seems lost on the government. We should not be announcing tax increases on one hand, while also announcing some unwarranted government expenditure that is seen as “dorime” by the public. The use of gestures to manage the public’s mood appears lost on us since it appears that like Brother Jackson screamed, “they don’t really care about us!” The effort put by Taiwo Oyedele in trying to sell the new tax bills to Nigerians is the kind of effort that should be put into government communications to ensure that people understand why the government is doing XYZ and know the potential impact on them.
While Nigerians may have an elastic limit that seems to prohibit any breakage point, the government owes a duty of care to seek the overall good of its employer. Attempting to tax Nigerians via different orifices without any benefits to long-suffering Nigerians, nor visible sense of responsibility by the government is clearly not in the interest of Nigerians. May the government take the gentle advice of the head of the government and let the poor breathe!
Image Credit: Microsoft’s Copilot
Jilomes 