Tinubu’s New Tax Regime as Sovereignty for Sale

By Farooq A. Kperogi

For weeks, I deliberately avoided commenting on the sweeping new tax regime the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration plans to roll out next year. It’s not because I did not recognize its gravity, but because I am not an economist and did not want to wade into a technically dense debate armed only with moral outrage.

Silence, in this case, felt like intellectual humility. Two developments, however, forced my hand.

The first was the unexpected melodrama that erupted in northern Nigerian social media circles over the federal government’s choice of influencers to “explain” the new tax policies to Nigerians. When a list circulated showing that most of the recruited social media advocates were from the South, northern influencers cried marginalization.

The grievance was loud enough that government handlers scrambled to recruit northern voices to restore regional balance. That this was the most animated public conversation around a punishing tax regime already tells us something disquieting about our political culture.

The second trigger was a widely shared Instagram video posted on October 18, 2025, by The Rohrs Team, a US-based financial education outfit. The video framed Africa’s current wave of tax reforms as a form of “debt colonialism.”

It argues that international institutions and Western governments have perfected a system in which African states are encouraged to accumulate debt and then trained to squeeze their own poor, struggling populations to service that debt. Watching the video, I found myself simultaneously nodding in recognition and wincing at its exaggerations.

The video’s core claims are straightforward. It alleges that United Nations-linked initiatives such as Tax Inspectors Without Borders embed Western forensic tax experts in African countries to help governments close tax loopholes, audit businesses, and boost revenue.

It then argues that these efforts are not neutral capacity-building exercises, but part of an expansive IMF and World Bank-driven system designed to ensure that African countries generate enough revenue to repay foreign loans.

According to the video, this system relies on carrot-and-stick tactics: cooperate with external tax advisers and access more loans, resist and face isolation or penalties. The end result, it concludes, is a more efficient and less visible form of colonial extraction.

My check from multiple sources shows that some of this is wrong. Some of it is imprecise. Some of it is uncomfortably true.

It is false that UN or OECD officials directly impose tax laws, prosecute businesses, or collect money on behalf of Western creditors. Tax Inspectors Without Borders does not write tax legislation and does not wield enforcement powers. Those functions remain with national governments.

Claims that Tunisia’s tax-to-GDP ratio increased by over 50 percent because of UN tax collectors are also demonstrably overstated.

But dismissing the entire argument as conspiracy would be intellectually lazy.

What is undeniably true is that Nigeria, like many developing countries, is operating under intense fiscal pressure shaped by external actors. The IMF has for years emphasized “domestic resource mobilization” as a central plank of economic reform.

That’s just a fancy term for raising more taxes. Nigeria’s chronically low tax-to-GDP ratio is routinely cited as a pathology that must be cured. Debt sustainability analyses, credit ratings, access to concessional financing, and investor confidence all hinge on this logic.

In that sense, no one needs to issue direct orders. The structure does the coercion. If this sounds abstract, Kenya offers a concrete, sobering example.

In 2024, the Kenyan government introduced a sweeping finance bill that raised taxes across multiple sectors, including fuel, basic goods, and digital services. The bill was explicitly linked to Kenya’s IMF program and the need to so-called plug fiscal gaps.

The result was one of the most dramatic popular uprisings the country has seen in decades. Protesters poured into the streets, security forces responded brutally, and lives were lost. Faced with mounting unrest, the government withdrew the bill.

The story did not end there. The IMF openly acknowledged that the withdrawal created a financing shortfall. The question immediately became how Kenya would replace the lost revenue, whether through spending cuts, alternative taxes, or future legislation.

In other words, the policy instrument changed, but the fiscal imperative remained intact. That is how structural coercion works. The state may retreat tactically, but the economic logic reasserts itself.

Nigeria’s impending tax regime fits neatly into this global pattern. The government presents it as modernization, efficiency and fairness. But its timing and content are inseparable from the overarching debt-fueled economic restructuring that has already produced fuel subsidy removal, currency devaluation, and a cost-of-living crisis of historic proportions.

The same external logic that declared petrol subsidies fiscally irresponsible now applauds aggressive tax expansion as prudent governance.

This is where the Instagram video, for all its rhetorical excess, gets something fundamentally right: sovereignty, as currently practiced, is largely a scam.

Nigeria may have a flag, an anthem and an elected government, but its macroeconomic choices are tightly circumscribed by external expectations. The petrol price regime that has tripled transportation and food costs did not emerge from a grassroots Nigerian consensus. It was the predictable outcome of long-standing IMF orthodoxy about subsidies.

The new tax regime, coming on the heels of that shock, follows the same script. Nigerians are being asked to pay more, endure more and sacrifice more in the name of fiscal responsibility defined elsewhere.

The economic consequences are not difficult to anticipate. Higher consumption taxes and compliance costs in an economy already hollowed out by inflation will depress demand, push more businesses into informality and further erode purchasing power.

Small traders, transport workers and salaried employees will feel the squeeze long before multinational corporations do. In a country where real wages have collapsed and unemployment remains structurally high, this is punishment.

And yet, there is an irony here worth lingering on. For the first time in decades, a significant number of Nigerians may begin to feel, viscerally, that the state is funded by their money. Oil rents long insulated the Nigerian government from its citizens. Taxes were an afterthought, easily evaded and politically inconsequential.

A regime that aggressively extracts revenue from ordinary people risks provoking resentment, but it also risks awakening accountability.

When people know that their tax naira pays for governance, the psychological contract changes. Suddenly, waste is personal. Corruption is theft from one’s pocket. Incompetence becomes intolerable.

The old revolutionary slogan “taxation without representation” was not just about money. It was about dignity and political agency. It was about the right to demand explanations from those who govern.

Nigeria’s new tax regime, harsh as it is, might inadvertently inaugurate a new era of critical democratic citizenship. Citizens who feel economically assaulted may also feel politically entitled. They may begin to ask harder questions, organize more assertively and reject the culture of elite impunity that oil wealth sustained for so long.

This brings me back to the farce of social media influencers scrambling for government patronage.

There is something profoundly grotesque about watching influencers fight over who gets to propagandize for a policy that will make life harder for most Nigerians. It is even more grotesque when this scramble is framed as a regional inclusion debate rather than a substantive policy argument.

The Tinubu administration recruits influencers not to so much to educate citizens as to anesthetize them. Explanation, in this context, is a euphemism for persuasion, and persuasion shades quickly into rhetorical intimidation.

I fully expect that the newly hired influencer battalions will soon swing into action, defending the indefensible, smearing critics, and blurring the line between advocacy and libel.

If recent experience is any guide, I may well become one of their earliest practice targets for having the audacity to point out that a tax regime can be both externally inspired and domestically harmful. Well, I am already used to that.

Nigeria deserves a conversation that goes beyond technocratic jargon and influencer theatrics. It deserves an honest reckoning with the reality that its economic sovereignty is constrained, its people are bearing disproportionate costs and its leaders are more accountable to international creditors than to the citizens they tax.

If this new tax regime teaches Nigerians anything, I hope it is that when the state reaches deep into your pocket, you earn the moral right to reach just as deeply into its conscience.