Nigeria Needs To Stop Taxing Poverty
The only area Nigeria is innovating is taxing its citizens and companies. It is really ridiculous. I am hoping someone changes this trajectory because it is taxing poverty: "the federal government of Nigeria disclosed its projection to generate the sum of N136.3 billion as revenue from Electronic Money transfers to be paid by bank customers in 2023...
The government disclosed that Electronic Money transfer charges generated N97.3 billion for the government in April 2022, which was the highest amount generated from Electronic Money transfers in the country since its adoption in 2020. Revenue generated from electronic money transfers made up 14.29% of the total N680.78 billion generated by the federal government in the month of April."
If you want financial inclusion via digitization of payments, you cannot make this all about generating revenue. The poor folks will run since N50 is a lot of money for them. Sure, this is not to say that it is easy for the government with largely limited alternatives to fund bureaucracy.
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But do not politicize this - the power which gave the government the rights to do this was fully approved in the National Assembly. What that means is this:, it is not an APC, PDP, etc thing. It is simply leadership being creative on taxation with no clue on how to stimulate economic growth.