Tag: Nigeria

For many across the globe, the past year must have been enervating not just with Donald Trump’s steep, punishing tariff walls, but his slow-motion torpedoing of the rules-based global order and the emerging rule of unrestrained, unchallengeable power. Thanks to Trump’s new-fangled Donroe doctrine, oil-rich Venezuela is practically under American receivership for debts which the Orange Man insists a certain Maduro owed Uncle Sam.  It is a brand new world order – one that is not so much a matter of choice but of compulsion – and if it becomes necessary, extortion.

For Nigeria, the acclaimed giant in the sun, the outgone year must have been one of a new realism and adjustments all the way. First was the burden of a 15 percent tariff clamped on her by Donald Trump under a rather dubious concept of reciprocity; second, the additional burden of fighting a war of terror with America not only breathing down her neck but deliberately mischaracterising as ‘Christian genocide’, and third, the well timed, low intensity scheme to torpedo the administration’s four signature tax laws – arguably the most consequential yet by the Bola Tinubu Presidency.

While the first two were exogenous and so the administration had little or no control over them, it is, nonetheless in my view, safe to say that the administration handled them admirably. 

Surely, there are figures to show. Going by the National Bureau of Statistics trade statistics, Nigeria’s exports to Africa in the third quarter of 2025 surged 97.16 per cent year-on-year to N4.9tn, a signal of how much realignment toward emerging markets is taking place, particularly intra-African trade and the BRICS bloc. Notably, exports to the United States and India reportedly declined significantly during the period. In other words, it’s not been exactly a season of lamentation, tariff or no tariff.

And we know the truth about Trump’s so called Christmas present – the precision strike operations were launched with the “explicit approval” of President Bola Tinubu and with “the full involvement of the armed forces of Nigeria”. In any case, that the terror war is being fought with renewed vigour and determination is no longer in doubt.

As for the third, the four tax laws on which the Tinubu administration had staked its reputation as incurable reformer, although the challenge had presented as a test of will for the administration, it was one instance that the administration will prove several steps ahead of an opposition sworn to ensure that the reforms do not see the light of the day.

Nigerians will recall the event of December 17, 2025, when an opposition member of the House of Representatives, Abdulsammad Dasuki (PDP, Sokoto), raised concerns over alleged inconsistencies between the tax laws passed by the National Assembly and the versions later gazetted and released to the public. Since then, all manners of conspiracy theories have been spawned all of them pouring fuel on the matter but adding little knowledge to the discourse on what matters most: the integrity of the process.

The man, Dasuki, conveniently forgot that four laws were actually passed by the parliament – The Nigeria Tax Act, The Nigeria Tax Administration Act (NTAA), The Nigeria Revenue Service (Establishment) Act (NRSA) and The Joint Revenue Board (Establishment) Act (JRBA). He didn’t care to tell Nigerians which of the law was altered. He even pretended not to know that the laws had perforce of presidential assent, were already in operation and so could only be amended through legislative action. For these, the usually excitable partisan mob were led into a wild goose chase over nothing; even as our hordes of street commentariat hopped from one television station to another with barely digested talking points all in the bid to bring down the roof!  

For the opposition and those sworn to help them muddy things up, it was sufficient to impugn the process, hoping that by so doing, the law would be rendered inoperable!  Well they were wrong! The laws are live!

For me, there is something fundamentally dishonest in what appears to be a calculated ambush of a process that Nigerians saw through with their own eyes. We saw it at the beginning when the Council of States openly kicked against the bill when the draft was first presented to them.

Ever since, it has been bad faith all the way! In fact, it became, at a point, a north-south affair with the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), asking northern lawmakers to reject certain components due to concerns it would disproportionately disadvantage the region, particularly the proposed Value Added Tax (VAT). 

Read Also: Trump buddy, Joe Lonsdale, invests in Nigerian drone startup Terrahaptix

Even the Northern Elders Forum described it as a policy conceived in bad faith and thus threatening national cohesion; none in the north in particular, seems persuaded that the bills deserved to be considered on its merit. A particular northern senator said he could not be bothered to read it let alone contemplate a discussion on it at the chambers! Which is why it is not entirely surprising that the opponents of the new laws are back on the same course. 

We are referring here to bills that experts had spent considerable time putting together; in this particular instance, it concerns a subject that the president had long signalled its importance to his administration’s reform agenda.  Here is a president who, all along didn’t pretend that he had all the answers to the questions raised by the bills’ opponents, requesting at a stage that objections be channelled to the parliament as part of the process. And to imagine in the final count that the outcome still fell short of satisfying the bloc of those who think that the president does not deserve a landmark legislation to his name! And to further imagine that they are not even about to give up the fight long after the laws have been in operation can only be a measure of the depth of their desperation!

How far will they go?

At this time, it’s hard to imagine. I salute the chairman of the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, Taiwo Oyedele. He has done a yeoman’s job of breaking down the issues for the ordinary Nigerian to understand. Mercifully too, the House of Representatives has released the certified copies of the four tax reform Acts. However, while the resort to open blackmail and campaign of misinformation has, thus far failed, I think the House of Representatives still owes the nation one additional duty: the man who came under the shield of privilege in parliament to raise hell must be compelled to show proof; in the event of failure to do that, he must be compelled to apologise to Nigerians whose privileges he has criminally violated.

Happy New Year, dear readers.