I refused to venture out in the searing heat of the tax reform debate. Now that “the hullabaloo is done” though the battle isn’t “lost and won” yet, I think I can safely show my hand. During my lying low, I may have found something that all of you missed because you allowed your heads to become too heated. Let’s go there, as they say.
My first finding was that those who came out, guns all blazing, against the reform, didn’t say the government shouldn’t tax Nigerians. No, they recognized that tax is one of the fools they must suffer under the social contract they have signed with the state in order to live as civilized human beings. If they have any problem at all, it is that the Nigerian government isn’t taxing the very rich enough or never at all. And when it does, this comes as overdose or overkill. Secondly, some of us incorrectly assumed that it was the whole spectrum of reform that was being shot down. Truth is, the president proposed to parliament SIX reform bills. But people chose to, understandably, focus on the draft legislation seeking alteration of the formula for sharing value added tax receipts. This tax is levied on goods and services, the fund raised from it being shared equally. Now the government wants to factor in location and consumption. This is where my northern brothers have a problem. The majority of northern states don’t manufacture, say alcoholic beverages, and, in fact, ban their consumption but they benefit from revenue gotten through VAT. If lawmakers pass the changes, it will mean a hefty revenue loss, supposedly, for the North. Maybe yes. But this is no big problem.
What I thought my people should have done was to be creative or imaginative. Turn an expected negative to a positive: push hard for VAT to be levied on raw materials that go into making alcoholic drinks that the North enjoys comparative advantage in. I’m talking of sorghum and maize. At present these are tax free. Let’s have the beer producers pay tax on them so the North can have something for its sweat. And why not, the Northern states that allow the ‘brewing’ and consumption of burukutu can put a small levy on it to improve their IGR performance! But will they? Relaxed in the comfort of petro dollar windfall, they simply can’t wrap their heads round things as simple as this.
However, more important, my people should complain less about the North’s feared loss from Tinubu’s tax reform and ask hard questions like what are our leaders are doing or not doing with the funds they are receiving on our behalf. The North today is scandalously worse off than what our post independence leaders had envisioned it. It lags far, far behind the South at all levels of development. Education, for example, has contracted or stagnated to the point where we have over 11 million children out of the formal school system. Poverty and disease are rampant. Insecurity is the order of the day. Bandits and sectarian groups recruit foot soldiers from the ready pool of out of school children. Yet our political leaders carry on as though all is well. Their motorcades romp through the empty streets of their capital cities while our people are too scared and too indifferent to steal a look at insolent power.
But this crass display of power and ill gotten wealth would not go on unchallenged. Hungry, jobless university graduates couldn’t hold back their frustrations anymore and began to speak out and up. In 2017, these angry young men, in their numbers, descended on a meeting of northern state governors that was well under way in Kaduna. They demanded their share of the billions they received from the public purse every month. The governors fled, caps flying off their heads and baban riga flailing in the disturbed afternoon air. For the next 3-5 years they avoided Kaduna like the Egyptian plagues. This holding of our leaders to account is what our youth should be doing more often than resorting to crime. Escapism, for this is what crime is, does not pay now and won’t pay tomorrow either.
Our leaders want us to fight for their tomorrow for them so that they continue to be chubby and healthy. But we, what do we get? Ask them. They want to continue to receive VAT at the same rate they are receiving now, if not more. But first, let them show, on the ground (the hard facts), what they have done or are doing with what they have got so far. Nothing. As impoverished and backward as our region is, our leaders are so callous or insensitive as to take all the scarce resources for themselves. Many of them are on the EFCC’s arrest list for corruption, some have served jail terms and others have died serving term in prison. It is these same people that are telling us today the North is being shortchanged. Tell them no. They are using the name to fight for their glory, which is the shame of their stomachs. We must not fall for their cheap self servicing politic. We must think and act differently now than before.
