The Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has cautioned the President Bola Tinubu administration not to celebrate the outcome or its new tax reforms, adding that the purchasing power of Nigerians is still nothing to write home about.
He said the value of the N14 trillion allegedly collected from taxes this year alone, is less than that of N7 trillion that was realised last year.
Adebayo, in an interview, also dismissed a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara’s praise for tax policy, saying it is not revolutionary.
Noting that Tinubu is a known tax collector, Adebayo said: “So that tax collector experience is an improvement over the disorganised system that he met on the ground.
“He did tax collection in Lagos; he’s going to do tax collection in Abuja now. The problem is that the grandiose speeches of Dogara are overstating it.
“This reform is okay. It’s not the best, but it’s far better than what they had before. But they’re overselling it because what we need to understand is that they’ve done so many other things that have made the N14 trillion they are collecting now not worth the paper on which it is written, compared to what they met on the ground.”
Cautioning the government against celebrating because the people’s purchasing power is nothing to write home about, he said “If you do it in real value, what can you buy? The purchasing power of the N14 trillion is not as sound as N7 trillion in the previous year.”
