“Over time, there are plans for Nigeria to fund the government more than it does today. The actual tax collection in Nigeria is pretty low,” Bill Gates to Nigeria
I know Bill Gates very well, and have been in meetings with him. Those twisting his statements need to look at the context. Bill is not telling Nigerians to INCREASE tax rates or add more taxes, rather, he is asking Nigerians to become more effective on collecting taxes.
Understand that increasing the tax rate to boost tax revenue without improving collection is counter-productive, because you are simply over-taxing the few ones already paying taxes. That is not what Bill is saying: he wants Nigeria to deepen its tax collection efficiency.
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Nigeria is under severe stress as many manufacturing companies may not pay taxes in the next three years, after declaring record losses. According to the government tax agency, FIRS, more than 3000 manufacturing companies shut down in 2023, wiping out more than a trillion naira of revenue: “Zacch Adedeji, the chairman of the tax agency, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), noted that the Nigerian manufacturing sector lost N1.7 trillion in 2023 as a result of changes in FX policies, and most of those companies collapsed.”
That lost revenue would have generated billions of naira in tax revenue. The retroactive taxing of bank FOREX realized profits was partly done to recover some of the potential tax losses, since while the factories lost money, banks gained!
That said, Nigeria needs to GROW the economy even as it does any taxation engineering. I think even though the citizens may not be paying taxes formally, they are already over-taxed. Petrol was less than N300/litre in June 2023, today, it is close to N900/litre, that is a huge tax there!
So, in the real sense, Nigeria is doing well on tax collection. Where we are not doing well is presenting a strategic national blueprint for growth and opportunity, to help all the citizens understand where the nation is going. That is more important than any discussion on tax.
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We speak a lot of English in this country, without ever thinking through the words we utter. Where in the world do you have GDP of less than $300B for population of almost 230 million, and the supposed experts are still talking about effective taxation? How much tax do you want to earn from per capita that is below $2200? You are taxing very POOR people, isn’t that immoral? Nigerians don’t have any economic or purchasing power to be paying taxes, how hard is this to comprehend? Majority of the population are already on deficits, who will pay their debts?
If we don’t have anything left in our near empty brains that can push this economy to at least $1.5 trillion, yammering on effective tax collection will really show how bereft and pitiful our quality of thinking is. You are scaling poverty at unprecedented rate, and the managers are still talking about government revenue and taxes, to be collected from which pockets, the same pockets they have already stolen and torn apart?
We are becoming too dull to be classed as proper humans here. If we don’t have anything to say about ramping up this pitiful economy to something that guarantees $4000 per capita, then we should all get out of here. We have nothing for the suffering masses.