When Method Ruins the Goal

View From the Gallery BY Mahmud Jega

It has been long since I saw anything like it. Since last week, when the Senate turned down objections from some members and [hurriedly] admitted Federal Inland Revenue Service [FIRS] Chairman Zach Adedeji and other experts [interested parties, is more like it] to brief it on the contents of the four tax reform bills lying before it, a clerical and social media storm enveloped Northern Nigeria this past weekend. Leading Muslim clerics all over the region converted their pulpits during last Friday’s congregational prayers to lambast Deputy Senate President Barau Jibrin, who chaired that particular Senate session [with Senate President Godswill Akpabio strategically absent], for allowing in the government officials to brief the Senate when it was not on the order paper.

Sure, it was a curious thing to do. DSP later explained that most Nigerians, including many members of the National Assembly, had either not read nor comprehended the fine details of the bills in question and the input of experts would therefore help. That is true, except that the right time to call them in would have been when the relevant legislative committees hold public hearings on the bills. This is not far away, since the Senate passed the bills for second reading, after which they will be referred to committees and all stakeholders can then come forward to make their inputs.

So why should such a small procedural misstep ignite so much passion and allegations? Well, because, in the past few weeks, the impression has been created, in the North if not in the rest of the country, that the Tinubu Presidency is hell-bent on ramming these tax reforms bills through, for that matter in great haste. Back in October, a major meeting of Northern state governors, traditional rulers and other community leaders objected to the bills and feared that they could reduce the Northern states’ takings from Value Added Tax, VAT, which today is a major contributor to the Federation Account.

Quite likely, the Presidency viewed that stance as political blackmail and proceeded with the bills, though that was unwise. Governors and traditional rulers from 19 states out of 36 is a sizeable number. Nor are they known rabble-rousers. Thirteen of the 19 Northern governors belong to the President’s own party, APC, which suggests that there was no harmony even within the ruling party on these bills. In Nigeria, state governors are the most politically potent persons after the Presidency. APC has a total of twenty state governors in the whole country, and if 13 of them sign on to the dissatisfaction, there will be no harmony even in the party’s National Executive Committee meeting.

To boot, they were joined in the protest by the North’s most prominent traditional rulers, including Sultan of Sokoto, Shehu of Borno, Emir of Zazzau, Etsu Nupe and Ohinoyi of Igbirra. Now, one may suspect that traditional rulers only do the bidding of governors. I don’t think that is the case because in recent decades, these traditional rulers include retired Army Generals, retired Police, Customs and Security Service commanders, big businessmen and even a professor or two. They are strong enough to pull back if they felt that the governors were taking them for a political ride.

The cross-party nature of the gathering should have also given the Presidency a cause for pause. Five of the Northern governors are PDP members, including the Chairman of the PDP Governors Forum. One of them belongs to NNPP. All these non-APC governors have hot political issues with APC chapters in their states, so their coming together with APC governors on this issue should be noteworthy. At the very least, the views expressed by this gathering deserved engagement, education, enlightenment and persuasion in order to dispel their fears regarding the bills. As far as we could see publicly, nothing of the sort happened, though there may have been some moves underground.

Perhaps the Presidency did not want to cave in to the Northern leaders’ demand on these bills so as not to be seen in the West, and in the South generally, as having caved in to the North. Even if that is the case, it was much less understandable that the Presidency ignored the advice of the National Economic Council [NEC], chaired by the Vice President, to withdraw the bills from the National Assembly and allow room for more consultation. NEC includes all the country’s 36 governors. Its resolution was read by the Governor of Oyo State, who is not known to be anyone’s lackey and who in fact crossed party lines to help APC candidate Tinubu to win his key state in last year’s elections. Besides, no state governor has as yet come out to say he did not agree with the resolution. All they asked for was time for more consultation.

While many members of the National Assembly have been described as bench warmers and the Deputy Senate President himself suspects that many members have either not read nor understood the contents of the bills, state governors are on the whole of higher quality than the MPs. One of them is one of the country’s leading economists. Governors have more staff help than MPs, and almost every one of them must have assigned his commissioners and advisers to brief him on the implications of the tax reform bills with respect to his state. Besides, the Federal Government’s key economic managers, including the Finance, Budget and Planning Ministers and Governor of the Central Bank all sit in the NEC. The Vice President, who chairs it, is no push over in these matters either, as a former banker, state finance commissioner, two-term governor and senator.

It was shocking indeed when the Presidency publicly declared that it will not heed the request of NEC, the country’s highest economic advisory body, and that the bills should instead continue through the legislative process! Now, in a clime where the legislature has demonstrated visible capacity and independence, that would have been okay, because the MPs themselves can be relied upon to scrutinize the bills and admit the feelings of their constituents. I was once part of a media team that visited a US Congresswoman in Washington D.C, who chaired a House sub-committee. She told us that she had forty aides, including many researchers and pollsters. The latter constantly conduct opinion polls in her constituency to find out what her constituents are thinking before she takes a position on any bill.

Here in Nigeria, MPs may not have professional pollsters as aides [the “opinion polls” published ahead of last year’s elections were a fiasco] but they sure have their traditional means of knowing the feelings of their constituents. Quite often, they ignore these locals’ feelings in order to ingratiate themselves with powers in the Presidency or the party leadership. Why because, these powers can more predictably ensure an MP’s return to his seat in the next election than the feelings of his constituents. State governors are however a different kettle of fish. In most cases they were the ones that nominated, supported, bankrolled and in some cases, rammed MPs through to their seats. They could also undo them in the next election. When the Presidency and an MP’s state governor are pulling in different directions on this matter, then he or she is caught between a rock and a hard place.

When you take all these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into consideration, it was inevitable that the impression was created in many minds that the Tinubu Presidency is bent on ramming through these four tax bills through the National Assembly irrespective of anyone else’s feelings. Such a stance naturally breeds suspicions. Matters are not helped by the widespread feeling that the current National Assembly is a rubber stamp which always does the President’s bidding. However useful and beneficial to the country a leader believes a certain measure is, it is a sacred duty to educate and enlighten citizens. An American professor who visited Nigeria fifteen years ago said the fulfilment of democracy is the process, not the outcome. If all the correct procedures are followed without manipulation, then democratic expectations are fulfilled even if the final outcome turns out to be wrong. Adopting a know-it-all stance could prove to be ruinous in the long run.

The little public debate on the substance of these bills so far has already thrown up issues which, with wisdom and national peace in mind, could be artfully resolved. For example, the point has been made about the calculation of VAT for derivation purposes and the fact that big companies lump up all the tax and pay it at the location of their head offices. That is a point to ponder. The point has also been made that states that ban alcohol consumption in their states still benefit from VAT collected from it during the sharing process. As the former chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission [RMAFC] explained two years ago, alcohol is not an important VAT contributor as some people think. Still, VAT from alcohol could be removed from the whole collection and shared to only states where alcohol consumption is legal [never mind it is still consumed even in the states where alcohol  is banned, especially in mammy markets adjoining military barracks].

This brings me to another aspect of the methods being used by both proponents and opponents in this tax reform bills imbroglio. Personally, I do not support the religious blackmail tactics often employed by clerics in the course of political debates. Of course they are citizens too and they are entitled to their views, but I don’t think the pulpit is the right place to campaign against a non-moral, non-religious piece of legislation. A  friend and colleague of mine will remember that two years ago, I criticised a column article he wrote in which he described our senators as “agents of Satan” because they passed a Corporate Affairs Commission amendment law that Pentecostal churches’ leaders did not like. Why not simply go to the public hearings and make rational, instead of sentimental arguments?

Personally, I do not support the clerics’ all-out assault against DSP Barau Jibrin. But since my view is totally unlikely to influence them, my advice to the Presidency is to soften on this matter and not put pressure on DSP, House Speaker and other MPs, especially those from the North, to ram through these bills without further consultation and consensus building. Otherwise, it could win the battle and lose the war, because in the medium and long run, its friends in the region will be politically ruined.