American business magnate and co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has said tax collection in Nigeria is low.
Gatekeepers News reports that Gates who is currently in Nigeria for a series of events, said this while speaking at Pan-African youth dialogue on nutrition in Abuja, on Tuesday.
Gates said the low tax collection poses a challenge to adequately financing critical sectors such as health and education.
The software developer noted that for citizens to gain confidence in government’s ability to deliver quality healthcare, there must be a commitment to ensure that the funding of health programmes is well-managed.
He said, “Over time, there are plans for Nigeria to fund the government more than it does today. The actual tax collection in Nigeria is actually pretty low.”
“If citizens want the education and the health things, as they develop the confidence that these programmes can be very well run, and our foundation is involved with a lot of the exemplars that are showing the way in terms of making sure the money is spent really well, running a very efficient primary health care system where the employees are doing great work, the centres are where they should be, you don’t have underloaded centres or overloaded centres.”
“It’s exciting that we are driving the credibility of those health programmes and so that the citizens will feel like primary health care is amongst the priorities that should be very funded as you get some fiscal flexibility.”
The remarks come after Chairman Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms Committee, Taiwo Oyedele said his committee is proposing a law to National Assembly to increase value-added tax from the current 7.5% to 10%.
