Oxfam Cautions FG On Increase In VAT

…Says it Will Widen Poverty Level, Inequality Among Nigerians

By Bashir Hassan Abubakar

Against the background of a recent article released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last month, where it recommended that the Federal Government of Nigeria should increase Value Added Tax (VAT) from the current 7.5 percent, remove the official exchange rate and fuel subsidy to promote long-term, inclusive growth and strengthen Nigeria’s external position, Oxfam has cautioned that medium to long-term recovery efforts should continue promoting fiscal and policy space that allows for an increase in social spending, and progressive tax policies that collect sufficient revenue and redistribute wealth fairly.

This was contained in a press statement signed and issued by Oxfam Communications Specialist, Rita Abiodun and made available to our correspondent 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.

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“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,” said Dr. Ahonsi.

Rather than putting further burden on the bottom 99% of Nigerians, Oxfam reiterates its earlier recommendations to 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 Nigerian 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 ensure 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, Improve 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.

The press statement concludes with a call to the FG to tackle sexist laws that discriminate against women and create new gender-equal laws to uproot violence and discrimination.