Understanding Edo New Tax Administration (4)
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By Erasmus Ikhide
 Published
May 29th, 2009
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THE tax
administration in Nigeria is not a cast-iron
case without taking due cognizance of the
denizens; the very poor, the not so poor, the
rich and the supper rich. It is proportionate to
all according to his or her earnings so as to
curb undue exploitation of the poor to reward
the rich. The people of Edo State must find a
path back to those glorious days, to prosperity
as it were, by describing how to respond to our
depleting economy that left the vast majority
behind poverty line even before Oshiomhole’s
ascendancy. This, as we all know, is due mainly
to greed, visionlessness, and corruption that
rewarded injustice at the expense of hard labour.
Just now, Federal Government has caught the bug
and comes to the realization that the
healthiness of a nation lies critically at the
heart of taxation and, that concrete
nation-being suffers without holistic process of
taxation. The minister of State for Finance,
Remi Babalola has joined, though belatedly, in
our clarion calls in Edo and Lagos States in our
taxation drives as the single most potent source
of revenue generation towards the creation of a
viable economy. The reawaken is a welcome signal
that we may yet recover from the shock wave that
our nation has undergone due to the crash of oil
price over the last six to eight months.
At an annual tax conference of the Chartered
Institute of Taxation of Nigeria CITN, recently
held in Abuja, Remi Babalola alerted the nation
that Federal Government is being owed over N260
billion and $260 million in Withholding tax WHT,
Pay As You Earn PAYE, and Value Added Tax VAT,
by companies, institutions, ministries,
departments and agencies MDAs. ‘‘The government,
Remi Babalola said, ‘‘has observed the
disturbing trend of delay in the remittance of
revenue collected by some banks to the
appropriate authorities. There is alarming
volume of tax debts owed by companies,
institutions and MDAs to government, raising
question of whether the current penalty for
defaulters is adequate’’.
Not only that, Remi Babalola disclosed that
government would soon review the penalty for
defaulters in WHT, PAYE and VAT. He also averred
that government is determine to ensure that
taxes are certain, fair, easy to understand,
straight forward to pay and economical to
collect. He didn’t stop at that. He noted that
the government resolve is to be ‘proactive and
look beyond the challenges of the moment to
reposition the economy to effectively meet its
present and future growth needs, which all
Nigerians will be proud of’.
Make no mistake about it: there is nothing wrong
with our tax laws as amended in 2004, but every
dam thing has been wrong with the bizarre
leadership style of the rulers of this country
from bottom up that has let up its contractual
responsibility, albeit felt-heartedly, in lieu
of free money it gets from Niger Delta which it
allowed to be diverted to private use. If the
Nigeria state has judiciously utilized the oil
wealth to develop the teaming youths and the
infrastructures, the chances are that we would
have been far more between and comfortable with
ourselves today in all our chosen endevours.
It is not healthy for a nation to depend wholly
on an exhaustible resource when it can deviate
substantially through allowable variables as an
emulative precedent for nation-building. But
because we have failed to imbibe a culture of
contributing to the pool to sustain the imposing
structures our rulers imposed on us through
vague preoccupation and white elephant projects
occasioned by free money we also lost sight
along with our leaders that we are not on the
right part to economic rebirth.
The buck of the blames still rest at the barrel
chest of our corrupt politicians whose
insatiable lost for greed surpasses the genuine
desire to heal the festering virus that is
drowning the nation. Alas! The enemies of the
people of Edo State are now head-over-heels with
euphoria that the Comrade Governor was out to
chastise the people who voted him into office
with iron hands. The PDP running dogs are wont
to alledge that payment of tax was punishment to
the people of Edo who have been roundly denied
of good governance over the years.
These criticisms relocates us back to pre-Oshiomhole
era, where even the evidence of existence of
government vanished as a recognizable symbol of
governance. We wouldn’t get back to those
unenvied distinctions of our state, where
hundreds of billions of millions of dollars are
allocated to the state, but relocate to private
accounts at the same time.
Nothing can be more worrisome than to find one’s
state in more than sympathetic condition. But
the self-declared champions of Edo people are
the perpetuators of this given poverty in the
state. There is no use attempting any
holier-than-thou approach to what has become a
national issue that needed concerted efforts
towards the revival of the nation’s economy
woes. Oshiomhole’s resolve are that: wait a
minute, whether the outclassed predators like or
not the good people of Edo State who have borne
the burden of poverty will enjoy the last laugh.
But because we wouldn’t just walk up to the
Central Bank of Nigeria and ask to be given
minted print of hundreds of billions of naira we
need to develop our states as did Zimbabwe, we
opted for this painful but rewarding option that
encompasses mass reorientation of giving back
10% or a part of ones’ earnings to the state in
order to aggregate tangentially the plight and
aspiration of one and all.
Erasmus Ikhide is a Senior Special
Assistance
Media Affairs to
Edo State
Governor, Comrade Adams
Oshiomnhole.
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