Taiwo Oyedele, chairman of the presidential fiscal policy and tax reforms committee, has said the federal government will not sacrifice Nigeria’s future to protect individuals and groups who have benefited for years without paying taxes.
Gatekeepers News reports that Oyedele made the statement during the January business breakfast organised by the Franco-Nigerian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) in Lagos, where he spoke about the strong resistance facing the ongoing tax reforms and Nigeria’s poor revenue generation.
To explain the situation, he compared Nigeria’s tax performance with that of South Africa. He said South Africa generated over N60 trillion (naira equivalent) from personal income tax alone in 2024, stressing that the figure is higher than Nigeria’s total tax revenue from all sources put together.
He noted that Nigeria’s overall tax income includes petroleum profit tax, corporate income tax, value-added tax (VAT), and taxes collected by federal, state, and local governments.
“That is one tax from about 60 million people, compared to Nigeria’s 240 million people,” Oyedele said.
While admitting that South Africa has a higher per capita income, he argued that Nigeria still has the ability to improve personal income tax collection significantly.
“If you take the top 60 million people in Nigeria based on income, it will be comparable to the per capita income of South Africa,” the committee chairman said.
“Let’s say we can’t collect 60 trillion, why not 30? Guess how much we collected? It was under N3 trillion. Something is wrong, the math is not adding up.”
Oyedele said the gap between Nigeria’s potential and actual tax revenue is one of the major reasons the reforms are facing opposition.
“This is one of the reasons why we find the motivation to keep going because the people fighting the reforms are not telling you why they’re fighting them. It is because they made money for so long, they never paid taxes,” he said.
“We are designing a system that says nobody will be above the law anymore. You will fight it because it is hard to pay tax anywhere in the world, we understand that but we will not compromise the future of the country because what is at stake is much bigger than any of us.”
He also reminded Nigerians that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the four tax reform bills into law on June 26, 2025.
