First, Nigerians need to stop referring to the rest of Africa. As the map you highlighted (I’m reproducing here) showed, the rest of Africa no be our mate.

They are growing, we are not. We have to, as a matter of urgency, rid ourselves of this bullshit “Giant of Africa” deception. Then we have to begin to properly scope where we are and what we need to do.

It first starts with proper accountability, and there’s nothing better at illustrating that lack of accountability than the brouhaha involving Abba Kyari and Tunde Fowler.

This embarrassment is what happens when you run government business with lie. Propaganda does not fund a budget. First, we had a recession between 2016 and 2017. Oil prices plunged from 2014. Naturally, revenue collections would have under-performed that period, but they kept declaring record revenue collection in the newspapers.

Now their propaganda is coming back to bite them in the arse. Based on Mr. Kyari’s letter, GEJ’s FIRS collected more tax that Baba’s despite all the record announcements we’ve been having. How is that possible?

To be fair, in Nigeria you are expected to tax profits, earnings and sales, and it is impossible to do that with record unemployment, rising inflation, reduced consumer spending power and multi-dimensional poverty. But the honesty, and integrity to tell us the real situation, was not just there.

The ironic thing is that according to research by the Nigerian Tax Research Network, in terms of real revenue collected by the government, non-oil revenue, which is mainly taxes, surpassed oil revenue in 2016 for the first time since 1971, and has just held the line since then. Then add remittances which has surpassed both in terms of real value, and is now Nigeria’s leading source of revenue. See, Nigeria is having a major fiscal crisis, and the sooner we do what needs to be done, the better for our children.

Problem is, these guys don’t know what to do. It starts from having a proper and accurate census. What I’m really scared of now is that they will now tax the few open businesses to death in order to “raise” revenue…