Overlapping Budgets, altered Tax law, dodgy FIRS-French Collabo….What’s Next?

President Bola Tinubu has been packaged and touted as a top-notch accountant. His forte is in tax and fiscal matters for which we are told he had achieved milestones in his working experience at ExxonMobil and in his executive capacity as Governor of Lagos state.

It is said he first honed his skills in this regard as a graduate trainee with Deloitte, a blue-chip global accounting firm.

But howbeit that with such a sterling background in the profession, President Tinubu is seen to make such egregious mistakes in public tax and public finance issues that even a book keeper or bean counter could hardly make.

Currently President Tinubu’s administration finds itself unnecessarily enmeshed in avoidable accounting issues that seriously calls to question the administration’s competence and commitment to transparency and accountability on matters of governance.

At the recent budget presentation for the 2026 budget before the National Assembly, President Tinubu struggled to explain why the 2024 and 2025 budgets were sloppily implemented to the extent that they had to be rolled over to March 2026. The 2024 budget of N35. 06 trillion is to be repealed and re-enacted to N43.56 trillion. The budget of 2025 which was N54.99 trillion will be re-enacted at N48.32 trillion.

According to president Tinubu the re-enactment is to include items not previously budgeted for but which apparently had to be considered due to their importance.

Is there anybody out there who would believe that an administration that could not square the budgetary circle in 2024 and repeated the same thing in 2025 can somehow recover to do the business in three months time? De nada if you think so. If however you consider that this administration has put a store in undisciplined budgetary planning and implementation manifested in many ways and from that you come to believe that the March 2026 given for rectifying the discrepancies in the 2024 and 2025 budgets is not realisable, then you are not far from the truth.

It is incongruous that an administration that is peopled with fiscal ‘’experts’’ from the president down should be caught in this web of public finance malfeasance. The Buhari administration, which the Tinubu administration replaced and headed by a man with a purely military background and who presumably knows very little about such matters, did marvelously well in restoring our budget implementation to within the 12 months of the financial calendar.

It is not only that the administration does not place high score in budgetary discipline. It has also come to light that the administration is given to surreptitious, sleight-of-the-hand moves with tax issues. The trending issue now in the country is about the alteration made to the tax bill which was passed by the National Assembly after so much acrimony when it was first presented as an executive bill by President Tinubu sometime this year. Following the hiatus, about aspects of the bill both chambers of the National Assembly convened to work on and passed the bill.

But last week a member, Abdulsamad Dasuki alerted members of the House of Representatives that the gazette copy of law signed by president Tinubu contained several insertions which were not in the original bill passed by the National Assembly.

Was the president aware of these alterations at the point of signing the bill into law? If so, why did he not seek the relevant National Assembly members to rectify the inclusions? Did he try to find out who did it and why? Does the president not know that alteration to a bill passed by the National Assembly in such a cavalier manner constitute a serious constitutional breach and thus actionable?

It does not help that rather than address these pertinent questions about the tax law, the presidency has been arrogant and dismissive. Bayo Onanuga, the president’s spokesman described the genuine concerns raised on the tax law as ‘’nonsense’’ from the opposition. Temitope Ajayi another of  Tinubu’s aid in the presidency said the law cannot be stopped as certain aspects are already being implemented.

Taiwo Oyedele president Tinubu’s Tax Czar who is at the centre of the whole issue made a rather unconvincing attempt at defending the indefensible which amounted to a blackmail on Nigerians. His statement that the forged Tax law should not be delayed on account of the calls for thorough investigation on the matter before implementation is gratuitously insulting. According to him, delaying the law will affect businesses big and small across the nation and this will result in losses and disruption of economic activities. It is like saying someone who forged documents to enter the university should nonetheless be allowed to complete his studies because suspending or stopping him will result in him not graduating from the university. So in effect, Nigerians accept a law that has been criminally forged by person unknown as fait accompli just because somebody feels they cannot bring themselves to do what is right and proper as required by the law and the constitution under our democracy?

A similar scenario is playing out with the collaboration between the Federal Inland Revenue Service and a French tax agency over sharing tax data of Nigerians. Here again the people involved in this arrangement do not feel they owe Nigerians the courtesy of an explanation as to why they plan to hand over our tax information to a foreign tax agency in the dubious name of technical cooperation. The belief is that they are all knowing and that Nigerians who elected this government into office are not sophisticated enough to know the intricacies involved in the deal on their tax information. Nigerians may be daft as a brush upstairs on this matter as the president and his tax honchos think, but what Nigerians do know very well is that the French have left too many bad imprints in Africa and Nigeria that any deal that brings them close to our national space literally or figuratively will raise serious concerns. If the French are that good they would not have been kicked out of neighbouring African countries that they have colonised for centuries.

The foregoing issues and the way they have been handled shows incompetence, unconscionable hubris and even a proclivity for disregarding the necessary diligence and due process pertaining to issues of governance. From the concatenation of glaring incompetence accompanying the implementation of governance issues by this administration not just on the fiscal and budgetary issues but also on appointments of ambassadors where a dead man was included among the nominees, to lack of due diligence in appointing of ministers whose credentials were found to be dodgy. And just recently examples of such lack of diligence was displayed in the attempted promotion of the president’s aide-de-camp from Colonel to Brigadier-General in contravention of military service procedures and ethics. Needless to say that the president had to humiliatingly reverse this ill-thought decision.

Nigerians should realise that there is a danger to these seemingly innocuous developments. It not just the incompetence in the planning and the sloppiness in the implementation. It is the creeping desecration of the constitution on the altar of dubious excuse of national imperative. If Nigerians are not alert to these developments, we might wake up and find that our constitutional rights and privileges which we all fought to install are surreptitiously abrogated.

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