๐ฌ "A citizen that pays taxes is a citizen. If you are not a taxpayer, and not exempted, then you are not a citizen."
๐ณ๐ฌ With that uncompromising definition, His Excellency Bola Ahmed Tinubu, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, redefined the social contract from the main stage of the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali.
โ๏ธ The President spoke as a man who knows the file intimately. He had personally driven tax reform as Governor of Lagos State, transforming what was then a fiscally fragile sub-national into Nigeria's most autonomous fiscal jurisdiction. The architect of his current federal tax reform, Finance Minister Wale Edun, was sitting in the front row, the very person whose work has reshaped Nigeria's revenue architecture over the past three years.
๐ฏ Tinubu's argument was disarmingly direct. Nobody, anywhere in the world, wakes up wanting to pay taxes. Taxation is not friendly to the wealthy, to the middle class, or to the poor. And yet every citizen expects roads, hospitals, schools, pharmaceutical research, protection of the vulnerable and the country's children. The question that demanding citizens almost never answer, he noted with sharp irony, is the most basic one: who pays for it? You want a fine highway, but not through your land. You want a well-equipped hospital, but no taxes. The maths does not work, anywhere on earth.
๐ The historical wink was telling. His American interlocutor's ancestors, he reminded the room, famously threw the tea into the sea when they were taxed without representation. The lesson, in Tinubu's reading, is not that taxation is dangerous, it is that taxation creates demanding citizens. And demanding citizens, far from being a problem, are precisely what builds accountable states. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored just how strategic domestic fiscal capacity becomes when the world stops being predictable.
๐ The deeper message lands squarely on the African Ownership agenda Kigali has been amplifying all week. Pan-African capitalism cannot be financed indefinitely from external loans, declining aid, or volatile commodity rents. It will be financed by African citizens, African corporations and African tax systems that have the political legitimacy to function. The unlock is fiscal sovereignty, and fiscal sovereignty starts with taxation.
๐ท๐ผ The question Kigali is putting on the table this week is no longer whether African states need to raise more revenue domestically. It is whether they will dare to ask their citizens to fund the future they say they want.
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Congratulations to President Tinubu. I'm not a fan and I have been criticizing you for over a decade. Tbh, you are the least desperate politician Nigerians have ever witnessed. You sacrificed your ambition in 2007, and 2015 for you to be President today.
In a country where everyone wants to be President at the same time. You have shown that you don't have to be desperate to win. I'm not your fan and I will still continue to criticize you. However, recent happenings in our polity have shown that you are a rare one.
I wish you the very best!
ADC to NDC: If Peter Obi didnโt get the ADC presidential ticket and leaves the party, he is compromised and working for Tinubu โ Kenneth Okonkwo ๐๐ญ๐ Boxing Zazu
It wonโt happen by desperately jumping from one party to another or by unleashing a social media mob on everyone who slightly disagrees with you. I decided to pen my views personally -- again for the records. On this, I donโt mind being a one man minority.