THE Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Tax Policy and Fiscal Reforms, Taiwo Oyedele, has disclosed that the National Assembly will pass the controversial tax reform bills into law in the first quarter (Q1) of 2025.
Speaking at the weekend during The Platform, an event organised by The Covenant Nation to facilitate national development, Oyedele also said the implementation of the tax reform bills will commence in July.
The NASS is expected to resume deliberations on the bills after the suspension of actions on it last year.
President Bola Tinubu on October 13, 2024, asked the National Assembly to consider and pass four tax reform bills.
The bills have since received huge backlash, especially from those who labelled it as anti-north.
However, last week, the bills received the backing of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF).
NGF also proposed a new “equitable” sharing formula for VAT.
“I need to talk about the tax reforms. Part of the expectation is we expect the tax reforms to be approved, particularly the tax reform bills in 2025.
“Our expectation is before the end of Q1 and therefore, we can give notice to taxpayers to prepare themselves with capacity and begin to implement around 1st of July,” he said.
Oyedele argued that removing fuel subsidies was the best decision Nigeria could make as it was no longer sustainable.
He assured Nigerians that the ongoing economic reforms by the Bola Ahmed administration are beginning to yield good results.
“Removing subsidies is the best decision we made as a country. And we can now say that for once, subsidy is gone.
“We were living on window-dressed realities. If you look back to about two years ago, naira exchange rate was N450 depending on who you asked. But was our exchange rate really N450? If you wanted to buy petrol, it was under N200 per litre, but was it really under N200 per litre? “There wasn’t band A at the time. Electricity was what time at the time, but was that really the price? A country can afford to sell petrol at N200 per litre if you can afford it. But there is everything wrong if you can not afford it.
“I am a parent and would like to send my kids to school. If I can afford a school of N200 million her term, no problem. But if I cannot, they will do just the first term and won’t be able to continue their education. Maybe they should go to a school for N200,000 per term.
“So, Nigeria was doing worse than it ought to, and then we had this sense of “our economy was not doing great”. We thought that our economy was the largest in Africa.
“Our GDP was around N450 million dollars. We thought our per capita income is about $2, 000 per person but it was not up to that.”
According to him, Nigeria used all its revenue to service huge foreign debts before the removal of fuel subsidies.
“Nigeria used all its revenue to service debts. We were not paying debts back. we were just servicing it. In order what, everything other thing we did, from paying salaries to fighting Boko Haram, we were just borrowing.
“When Nigeria borrowed, we borrowed high digits and those were the funds we were using to run the economy and service debts.
“If anybody was not losing his sleep with just that alone, then, he must be from another planet. The outcome of what was happening was predictable. It was a Sri Lanka happening to us. It was a Venezuela.
“Their countries were that- you would hold money and you wouldn’t be able to get fuel to buy. There was a tile in Sri Lanka that you couldn’t drive your car every day of the week because there was no fuel.
“Our GDP growth rate was very low. Over the past ten years less than 10 per cent. If you do it in real time, it is negative.
Since assuming office in May 2023, President Tinubu has implemented a number of reforms. Top among them is the removal of fuel subsidies and introduction of the tax bills.