Bola Tinubu’s Tax Laws: Tainted By Bad Faith, Integrity Deficit

 By Olu Fasan

Hardly anyone disagreed that Nigeria needed a new tax regime. The erstwhile tax rules were complex and cumbersome, their administration ridden with corruption and inefficiency. So, when, in August 2023, barely four months in office, President Bola Tinubu inaugurated the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, he was on to something truly transformative if carefully crafted and shaped by a broad consensus.

*Tinubu signs the new tax law

 Unfortunately, however, the tax reforms started off on the wrong foot and ended, after a tortuous process, with new tax laws tainted by bad faith, manifested in skulduggery and cognitive biases that threaten to undermine the integrity and, thus, success of the new tax regime.

The One Trilion Naira Mischief

Press Release 

The attention of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has been drawn to a report captioned, "Alleged N1tn diversion: Senate to probe Lamorde’s alleged diversion of N1tn," which appeared in The Punch Newspaper of Monday August 24, 2015 containing salacious claims of corruption against the person of the chairman of the Commission, Ibrahim Lamorde.

*Lamorde 

(pix: dailytimes)

The EFCC should ordinarily not dignify the publication with a response as the motives of the promoters and their media allies are to impugn the integrity of the EFCC boss with fabricated stories of corruption.
However the Commission is constrained to respond, to expose the motive behind the sinister plot. In the first instance, claims of a N1trillion corruption in the EFCC is infantile and assaults the sensibilities of all reasonable stakeholders in the anti- corruption fight.

Even if the EFCC had not returned a kobo of recovered assets in its 12 years existence in addition to the yearly appropriated funds from the federation account, it will be nowhere near a trillion naira. This clearly exposes the mission of the so called petitioner as nothing more than mischief, designed to smear Lamorde.