|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Akanji Alowolodu, Bauchi
Oxfam is of the view that medium to long-term recovery efforts should continue promoting fiscal and policy space that allows for an increase, rather than a decrease, in social spending, and progressive tax policies that collect sufficient revenue and redistribute wealth fairly.
Oxfam was reacting to the January 31, 2022, Article IV of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released by its Executive Board which recommended that the Federal Government of Nigeria should urgently 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.
According to Oxfam in a press release on Monday, “A sharp increase in VAT will widen the inequality gap in Nigeria and may plunge more Nigerians into extreme poverty”.
Dr. Vincent Ahonsi, the Country Director of Oxfam in Nigeria stated in the release that in Nigeria, the two richest billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 63 million Nigerians.
According to Dr Vincent Ahonsi, “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”.
He further said that, rather than putting further burden on the bottom 99% of Nigerians, Oxfam reiterated 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.
It should also 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.
The Government was also advised to sharply increase its 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.
It should Scale-up social protection, including enacting the social protection plans for the country to meet coverage levels more in line with Nigeria’s middle-income status and 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 government should also ensure that it Tackled sexist laws that discriminate against women and create new gender-equal laws to uproot violence and discrimination.
