The Special Adviser to the President on Revenue, Zach Adedeji said President Bola Tinubu’s vision for growing Nigeria’s is to tax prosperity and not poverty.
Adedeji stated this while speaking in an interview with Channels Television on Monday.
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 posperity; 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 N15trn 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 is 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 is not going to collapse revenue-generating bodies like 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 will use technology to integrate all revenue-collecting agencies to monitor revenue in real-time and remove any form of “government within government.”
Adedeji also stressed that Tinubu has already approved the harmonisation of all the revenue-collecting agencies.
“We are not collapsing. NNPC will be NNPC because it is limited, Federal Inland Revenue (Service) will be but the collection of all revenue will be technologically driven by data…Why there seems to be government within government is because of the law because there is no real law that specify what they should do.”
He also said the removal of petrol subsidy and the unification of foreign exchange rates has removed the “distortion we have in our economy.”
The Tinubu’s revenue chief said Nigerians would soon begin to see the “windfall which I know will bring shared prosperity for all Nigerians.”
