The Lagos State Commissioner for Finance, Dr Rabiu Olowo, has advocated for the payment of higher taxes in Nigeria as oil has proven unreliable.
Mr Olowo stated this at an online symposium organised by the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University, adding that economic crisis in the wake of the pandemic has made optimising taxation imperative.
“Nigeria’s current tax to GDP ratio of between four to seven per cent is very far from satisfactory. This has been an issue for some time but the COVID-19 economic crisis provides a renewed opportunity for stakeholders to frontally confront this problem.”
“We cannot be waiting for oil revenue to develop our country when its volatility is a well-known problem. We need to summon the political will to embrace tax. We cannot be doing the same thing and expect different results,” the Commissioner said.
He noted that developed countries no longer discuss whether to tax or not, but strategies and policies for effective taxation.
“But in Africa, we are still thinking of how to tax. From discussions at the symposium, it is obvious we are losing billions of dollars to tax manipulation by multinationals and we should look into this urgently.
“If we evade or pay lower taxes, we should expect a lower quality of governance. Most of the countries we admire are built on high tax, high quality governance. We cannot be an exception,” Dr Olowo said.
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