A more optimistic view of the call on residents and companies to pay taxes is for citizens to see this as inevitable return of their sovereignty to them by those who had distracted citizens from their primary political responsibility in the past.
There is no room for failure over FIRS’s attainment of its 2016 target of N4.97 trillion to the Federal Government. This is not a joke. We need everybody to do his/her beat to ensure that everybody contributes (sic) to the achievement of the target. The nation will depend on FIRS to fund the budget. We need the money to stabilise the economy.–Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Finance Minister
The subjects of every state ought to contribute to the support of the government, as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities: that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation. -Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations
A democracy requires accountability and accountability requires transparency. -Barack Obama
Nigeria has been for too long a state run on the model of landlordism by those charged with rent collection from petroleum, who generally relish treating Nigerians not as citizens but as tenants. This philosophy of governance and of citizen-state relations had not always been so. Towards the end of the colonial era, taxation at the instance of colonial administrators and later of pre-Independence political leaders applied the principle of social contract with citizens, by assuring them in their rhetoric and praxis that the taxes citizens paid would address their social needs. This was why resistance to tax by citizens, especially in Western and Eastern regions weakened until when citizens joyfully paid their taxes, particularly during Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s unmistakable use of tax funds for social programmes that citizens could identify with. Now that Nigeria has been forced by collapse of oil price to return to funding of governance through taxes from citizens and non-citizens, as it is done in most self-sustaining countries of the world, this column will return to addressing previous themes covered on this page in the past: complementary responsibility of the taker and giver of taxes in a democracy.
In the years before the onset of military rule in 1966, especially after the civil war when the principal source of funding for the government was rent collection from sale of petroleum, it was money collected directly and indirectly from citizens, residents, and companies that drove governance. For example, most of the infrastructure and institutions created in the four regions before the 1970s derived from funds collected directly and indirectly from the people and the economic activities they engaged in. However, continued surge in revenue from petroleum not only encouraged military rulers to create a bloated central government in terms of functions and revenue; it also drove the policy of proliferation of states and of intended or unintended alienation of citizens from governments. Military rulers (and later civilians) of the central government in particular had the courage to delete the support of citizens from consideration, once they felt there were sufficient funds from petroleum sale to create whatever appealed to the fancies of rulers-be they military or civilian between 1975 and 2015.
Military rulers who came to power by force of arms or civilian governments rigged into power found encouragement in the assured and growing revenue from petroleum to distance citizens from the state. This policy over time kept citizens away from scrutinising how they were governed, thus saving political and bureaucratic leaders from accountability. Military rulers were content with citizen apathy generated by alienation, as this situation made it easier for rulers to manage civil society organisations and the media that had the courage to hold rulers to account periodically. Corruption of some members of the media and sponsoring by rulers of civil society organisations to counter those that were genuinely pro-citizens’ interests gained ground during decades of military rule. The result of such policy on the part of government, especially the central government, is estrangement or withdrawal or separation of a person’s or group’s affections from an object or group such as those in charge of governance.
Such alienation erodes or represses citizens’ political efficacy that should have allowed them to exercise their sovereignty. Instead, a polity committed to alienating citizens created a culture in which citizens largely, in the words of Dan Hind in The Return of the Public, “accept government’s authority almost to the point of autocracy.” It has taken the election of 2015 and the ascendancy of Mohammed Buhari as president to know the dangerous implications of decades of separation between those who governed the country and those that were governed. Suddenly, citizens now get to see the difference between discussion of corruption in the media as abstract ideas and the details of corrupt acts by those charged as politicians or civil servants to serve as minders of the state.
It is possible that if the price of petroleum had not slumped, partisan traditional and social media could still have been able to urge the public to move on and forget the past, in order to mask the details of corruption in the polity. But the coming at the same time of an austere anti-corruption president and the loss of value of petroleum in the international market has unearthed the venality of crass political and bureaucratic corruption in the country. This has also compelled those newly charged to govern the country decades after consolidation of the culture of corruption to come back to citizens for collaboration with government through putting the onus of funding the country on citizens, residents, and their businesses. The return to the public by the Finance Minister when she said, “We need everybody to do his/her beat to ensure that everybody contributes (sic) to the achievement of the target” of raising 4.97 trillion from tax to fund a the 6+ trillion budget and to stabilise the economy knowingly or unknowingly calls on citizens to take their country back from banditry of decades-long irresponsible and unresponsive governance.
It is conceivable that many citizens who did not feel pressured for decades to pay taxes religiously because of the culture of parasitism made possible by assured flow of revenue from petroleum and stratagems on the part of military and civilian rulers to save themselves from public scrutiny are likely to feel inconvenienced by government’s demand for prompt payment of taxes to fund governance. This may be a pessimistic view of the new reality by such citizens. A more optimistic view of the call on residents and companies to pay taxes is for citizens to see this as inevitable return of their sovereignty to them by those who had distracted citizens from their primary political responsibility in the past.
Putting as many corrupt citizens in jail after proper trial; strengthening regulatory regimes to discourage corruption, and teaching young people in all schools about the value of honesty may not end corruption, without the readiness of citizens to invoke their power to read the riot act to politicians and civil servants that abuse their office. Such readiness will be stimulated and sustained once citizens provide the bulk of funds put in the care of politicians and civil servants. If citizens want to eat the omelette of good governance, they have to be prepared to break the eggs of reading riot acts to those who rob them of their commonwealth, by enthusiastically re-claiming their ownership of the state. Citizens’ readiness to invoke their sovereignty during and after elections is now required, more than ever before, to end a culture in which representatives of citizens as members of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of government act as if they are sole owners of the republic.
To be continued
NATION
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