Tinubu’s Tax Reform: Where is ASUU
By Prof. Moses Ochonu
They say I’m too harsh on ASUU, but sometimes I honestly can’t help but attribute the body’s failures to incompetence or willful self-sabotage.
How else does one interpret the relative silence of ASUU on the ongoing national controversy and conversation around Tinubu’s proposed tax reform when its signature accomplishment is on the line—potentially on the chopping block of “tax reform”?
As part of the tax reform package, Tinubu and his Lagos boys are proposing to abolish what they call multiple taxes and to consolidate them into a single tax to be paid by corporate entities.
This sounds innocuous and even laudatory until you look deeper.
By act of parliament, and as a result of the most important victory ASUU has won in its decades-long struggle, the FG collects a special education tax from the profits of companies operating in Nigeria and puts the money in a dedicated fund to finance higher education.
This fund, separate from other taxes, goes directly to the coffers of TETFUND, funding its activities and, more crucially, enabling it to finance various infrastructure and research projects and initiatives in Nigerian institutions of higher education.
As everyone familiar with higher education knows, TETFUND is the reason Nigerian public higher educational institutions have not gone under and have basic structures with which to operate.
It is the financial engine of higher education in Nigeria, and ASUU, rightly, takes pride in having struggled successfully for the education tax and the establishment of TETFUND. It is the capstone of the union’s struggle.
But under Tinubu’s tax reform proposal, the new tax bill would abrogate and supplant the education tax.
TETFUND would no longer have direct, guaranteed funding outside the politicized appropriations and federal allocation process.
Instead, TETFUND’s funding would be subject to the whim of overseeing politicians and bureaucrats and the rapacious meddling of folks at the National Assembly. Its funding would now become politicized and negotiable, no longer statutorily guaranteed by the implementation of a special tax.
In other words, Tinubu’s tax reform proposal directly threatens TETFUND, ASUU’s signature achievement, and its ability to continue to fund tertiary education in Nigeria, the very thing that ASUU claims to fight for and to care about.
Yet, ASUU’s lazy and shortsighted honchos are sleeping, and are yet to weigh in on the debate on the tax proposal or articulate a position that would protect TETFUND, ASUU’s baby and the first fruit of its labor.
Perhaps they’re waiting until the bill passes and the education tax, along with TETFUND’s funding, is subsumed by the proposed new single tax so that they can make it the reason for their next strike.
