By Bashir Hassan Abubakar
Against the backdrop of a recent article released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommending that the Federal Government increase Value Added Tax (VAT) from the current 7.5 percent, Oxfam Nigeria has cautioned that medium to long-term recovery efforts should adopted while promoting policies that allow increase in social spending and progressive tax policies for sufficient revenue and fair redistribution of wealth.
This was contained in a press statement signed and issued by Oxfam Communications Specialist, Rita Abiodun, and made available to our correspondent on Monday.
According to Dr Vincent Ahonsi, the Country Director of Oxfam in Nigeria, “an increase in VAT will widen the inequality gap in Nigeria and may plunge more Nigerians into extreme poverty”.
Oxfam opined that in Nigeria, the two richest billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 63 million Nigerians.
“Instead, Nigeria should tax the wealthy and invest the trillions that could be raised into social services and infrastructure, climate adaptation, improve early warning systems for extreme weather, help poor farmers to buy weather-indexed crop insurance, and research seeds that can better cope with droughts,” Dr Ahonsi said.
Rather than putting further burden on the bottom 99% of Nigerians, Oxfam reiterated its earlier recommendations to the Nigeria government to claw back the gains made by billionaires by taxing the huge new wealth made since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic through permanent wealth and capital taxes.
Also, the recommendations implored the Federal Government to take advantage of the COVID-related offers of debt relief to get its current debt service suspended, and negotiate a comprehensive cancellation of its overall debt as soon as possible.
Other recommendations suggest an increase in government spending on education and health, and ensuring that more of all its social spending gets to the poor to address chronic underfunding of public services and very poor outcomes/coverage for the poorest.
Oxfam further suggested the scaling up of social protection, including enacting the social protection plans for the country to meet coverage levels more in line with Nigeria’s middle-income status, improving transparency and accountability by publishing budgets both at federal and state levels, and enabling greater scrutiny of future allocations and expenditures by making budgets publicly available.
It therefore called on the FG to tackle sexist laws that discriminate against women and create new gender-equal laws to uproot violence and discrimination.