Tax Reform Bill: Northern elites should be concerned about adding value to products

As controversies over the Tax Reform Bill continue unabated, a group under the auspices of the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI) has expressed dismay over the development, cautioning the North to drop sentiments held towards the bill.

Recall that the Tax Reform Bill, which is currently before the National Assembly, has been generating diverse reactions from a cross-section of Nigerians, with the northern elites mostly opposing its passage.

The group, comprising intellectuals drawn from the media, including public and private sector players, regretted that opposing voices were causing distractions and hindering the economic attributes of the bill, particularly in terms of revenue generation, enterprise development, and enhancement of citizens’ purchasing power.

While addressing a press conference in Abuja at the weekend, Ahmad Sajoh, a former Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Adamawa State, criticized the North for opposing the bill, lamenting that their fears were mostly unfounded because they had failed over the years to add value to what they produce in the region.

To buttress his position, he said the blood generated from the slaughter of cows is the best by-product for producing fish feed in the world, but it is wasted daily in Nigeria.

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According to Sajoh, most of the fears being nursed by the northern elites regarding the bill are baseless, lamenting that the majority of them don’t have empirical arguments to support their opposition to the bill.

He linked their worries to the initial fears most Nigerians had when the issue of state police was being mooted, but it has since been endorsed by a majority of stakeholders because of the level of insecurity in the country.

His words: “I think that as a northerner and as somebody who has been in the state executive in the northern state, I can tell you very categorically that the fears of the northern governments are unfounded.

“It is premised on the very wrong notion of a northern Nigeria that does not want to support productive activities. The chairman told you very clearly that it is about value addition.

“If the North had agreed that as northerners and as northern governors and northern governments, what we would do within a certain period, for example, is first and foremost to add value to the products we have, even if they are just agricultural.

“You take a cow, for instance. If a northern state government can establish an abattoir that slaughters a thousand cows a day and processes it into meat, once you create a channel through which the blood gathers—blood of a thousand cattle—if you process it, it can be used for so many other things.

“The bones are valuable. The horns are valuable. The hooves are valuable. The skin—if you add value to the skin—when I was growing up, we had a Tumsa factory in Maiduguri and another factory in Kano where they produced shoes, bags, belts, and others. If they could only learn to begin to add value to the products we have, they would not even worry about value-added tax or any other tax for that matter, because the North is rich.

“Nasarawa State has just established a lithium processing factory. Kaduna is doing the same. So they should begin to think about adding value to the products that we produce in the North. They should begin to think about productive engagement, not what is going on. So I don’t think there’s any need for us to begin to fear.

“In any case, the major fear was that if you transfer money in your bank in Yola or Sokoto or anywhere, the bank goes to the bank headquarters in Lagos. But this law did not say that.

“For the telecom companies, they are ICT-compliant. You can track every call you make to a particular location. So all these fears are unfounded.

“Just like the other fears, the fear of state police is based on a misunderstanding of the term policing. Policemen are different from policing. What Amotekun is doing is policing. What JTF is doing in Maiduguri is policing. What the Zamfara and the Katsina people are doing is policing. What LASTMA is doing is policing.

“A lot of these things are based on hysteria. ‘Ah, the North is going to be cheated.’ If you sit down and ask them, ‘Okay, tell me what are the areas that the North will be cheated,’ Wallahi, they will not tell you.”

Corroborating Sajoh, Chairman of IMPI, Omoniyi Akinsiju, observed that the furore generated over the proposed sharing formula for the proceeds of VAT as contained in the bill is the typical expression of the hangover from the era of squabbling over who gets the lion’s share from the revenue so generated.

According to IMPI, what should be of paramount concern to Nigerians should be to innovate and create a symbiotic fiscal relationship between the state and the people in a win-win situation.