Is Politics Behind Tax Reform Protest?
By Zekeri Idakwo Laruba
Nigeria has undertaken several reform exercises over the years, ranging from electoral restructuring to constitutional amendments, yet few have generated as much controversy in recent times as the current tax reforms. While past reforms often stirred public debates within political and legal circles, tax reform has struck closer to everyday survival, touching income, consumption, and especially where standard of living is measured by rice affordability. It is this direct impact on daily life, more than the reform itself, that has elevated public anxiety and made the policy a fertile ground for political contestation.
The debate and controversy once again came into the limelight following an extensive interview by the Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), formerly FIRS, Zacch Adedeji, on a national Television. Calm, intentional and unusually detailed, Adedeji spent minutes explaining what many citizens had already judged in seconds, how income taxes differ from transactional taxes like VAT, why withholding tax is not a fresh levy, and why January 1 marked implementation, not the birth, of a new law. Yet, beyond the technicalities, his most striking intervention was not about tax codes, but about politics.
Adedeji’s warning that much of the outrage trailing the reforms is driven by political agendas touches a nerve Nigerians instinctively understand. You can take politics out of policy documents, but you cannot take it out of human behaviour. In a country where economic pain, power struggle and public distrust often intersect, no major reform escapes political colouring.
The NRS chairman explained that the tax law was passed by the National Assembly in June 2025 and assented to by the President months before implementation began. What Nigerians witnessed on January 1, he said, was merely the activation of rates after a six-month adjustment window, standard practice in tax administration. Still, protests erupted, fuelled by claims that bank transfers would be taxed indiscriminately, that POS operators were being targeted, and that citizens’ accounts would come under government surveillance.
Adedeji dismissed these fears as misinformation. Income tax, he clarified, applies to earnings. Transactional taxes like VAT apply to consumption, regardless of income level. Withholding tax, often misunderstood, is simply prepaid tax credited against future liabilities. Paying PAYE does not exempt anyone from VAT on goods and services, just as it does not anywhere else in the world. According to him, these structures are not designed to punish citizens but to streamline revenue collection in a system that has long leaked badly.
But the resistance, loud as it is, cannot be understood purely through spreadsheets and tax manuals. Politics looms large. Politics of regional interest and politics of opposition cannot divorced from this ongoing controversy. Aside the fact that some sectional leaders kicked against the idea of tax reforms ab initio, the lawmaker who blew the whistle on the so-called forgery has not come up with any proof or evidence. The House of Representatives has disowned his claim and the entire National Assembly has said there is no credibility in the accusation of forgery. Opposition figures have also sought to take advantage of the situation to scandalise the administration and asked for the suspension of the law.
This could be reason the President is insistent on moving on with the implementation as planned in the same spirit he refused to reverse the policy of fuel subsidy removal.
What is striking, however, is the selective outrage now dominating the space. Tax enforcement has existed for years at federal and state levels, often more aggressively at the subnational tier. Levies, tickets, market taxes and informal collections have bled small traders quietly, without organized protests. Yet a reform that explicitly removes VAT from food items and transportation, two major cost drivers for the poor, has been framed as anti-people.
Adedeji insists that more than 95 percent of low-income Nigerians are exempt under the new framework, arguing that when net benefits are examined, the poor gain the most.
Still, the political undertone is hard to ignore. Calls to “suspend the law,” Adedeji argued, betray motives beyond public interest. Laws, once passed, are not paused by street pressure; they are amended through institutions. In an environment inching towards the 2027 elections, tax reform offers a convenient rallying point for opposition forces seeking to frame the government as heartless and out of touch.
Yet, stripping away the politics leaves Nigeria with an uncomfortable truth: the country desperately needs tax reform. An economy of over 200 million people cannot function when a tiny fraction bears the burden of funding government, while the informal sector remains largely untaxed and public services remain underfunded. Oil revenue is no longer reliable, borrowing is choking the future, and subsidy-style economics has reached its limits.
Adedeji’s insistence that the NRS is “Nigeria Revenue Service, not Political Revenue Service” may sound defensive, but it underscores a critical point. Institutions must function beyond electoral cycles if the country is to make progress. Reform is never popular at inception. It is judged later, by whether roads are built, hospitals function, security improves and opportunities expand.
Politics may be behind parts of the protest, but hardship gives it traction. The government’s burden, therefore, is twofold: to communicate reforms with empathy and clarity, and to demonstrate, visibly, that political elites and the wealthy are not exempt from sacrifice. Without that credibility, even the best-designed reform will drown in suspicion.
In the end, Nigeria’s tax reform debate is not just about money. It is about trust, power and the eternal tension between today’s pain and tomorrow’s promise. Politics will always be in the room. The question is whether Nigeria can look past it long enough to fix what is broken.