Tinubu aims to tax prosperity not poverty, says aide

Tinubu aims to tax prosperity not poverty, says aide  

Special Adviser to the President on Revenue, Zach Adedeji, says President Bola Tinubu’s vision for growing Nigeria’s revenue is to tax prosperity and not poverty.

He stated this during an interview with Channels Television on Monday night.

He said, “The broad vision of Tinubu on revenue is not just tax. He believes that success of revenue management and collection comes for three places; economic policy – His intention is not to tax poverty, but to tax prosperity; his intention is not to tax production, but consumption and that is the first line.

“He (Tinubu) has removed the two impediments to our economic prosperity; one is the subsidy, second is the unification of the exchange rate which the CBN has done. That is laying the foundation for where we are going.

“The second one is restoring the confidence of the citizens, because they must know what government wants to use their money for.

“The last (third) one is the effective tax administration, which is the revenue generation and everything. We have that tripod we want to run with. We have the plan to generate more than enough to run our government,” he said.

Adedeji said the government will double its total annual revenue without imposing extra taxes.

According to him, the government will double the country’s total annual revenue which is currently below N15tn by deepening the nation’s revenue collection system and not by adding extra taxes.

He said Nigeria has a revenue problem but the current administration was prepared to tackle the challenge through fiscal discipline and harmonisation of revenue channels using technology to view all government revenue-collecting agencies in realtime.

“The law is very clear as to how to collect revenue. In Section 162 of the Nigerian Constitution, it is clearly stated that there shall be an account called the Federation Account and all government revenue must be put into that account,” he said.

“When we talk about harmonisation, we are just saying integration of all collecting agencies, that on one platform, we can know what is happening in NIMASA, NPA, NCC, Customs, Federal Inland Revenue (Service)…We will make use of technology to know everything going on in realtime.”

Adedeji stressed that the Tinubu administration was not going to collapse revenue-generating bodies such as the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), and the Nigeria Customs Service.

He said, the current administration would use technology to integrate all revenue-collecting agencies to monitor revenue in real-time and remove any form of “government within government.”