The quality of the politicians that are to be found in Nigerian opposition parties and the nature of their politics is an analyst’s nightmare. Their attitude complicates their arguments, which are almost always flawed, thereby making the analyst appear unduly critical.
To be clear, as far as the executive goes, the opposition is today virtually non-existent, with 29 of the 36 states governors now part of the ruling party. Of the remaining eight, shame would probably not let the two from the North-East defect given how noisy one of them, Bala Mohammed, had been in his criticism of both the President and the ruling party.
The other, like the first, is from the stronghold of the main opposition candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and would probably not want to be seen to have abandoned him. The third PDP governor, Seyi Makinde, is from the South-West, the president’s stronghold. Ademola Adeleke recently defected from the PDP to Accord Party.
Seyi Makinde worked for the president in the 2023 election while Ademola Adeleke opposed him. Adeleke’s state was one of the two Yoruba-speaking states, including Lagos, that the President lost in 2023. He tried but in vain to join the APC before pitching tent with AP. He was rejected by leaders of the APC in the state. They would not have him disrupt their already settled plan. Makinde is only now spearheading what looks like a lost cause: the rehabilitation of the PDP. This should tell everyone the quality of their opposition or the kind of support they are likely to enjoy opposing the President in his stronghold in the march towards 2027. Which brings me back to the type of political leaders that see themselves as opposed to the President today.
Their position, often bereft of both moral and intellectual rigour, is steeped in bluster. Not only do they oversimplify issues, they display a vexing lack of the basic knowledge that should undergird them. That is the manner they have generally responded to President Bola Tinubu’s tax reforms. It’s for them simply a question of you against us, with northern political elements constituting the arrowhead of the opposition, while politicians in the other parties like LP, NNPP and, lately, ADC ride on their coattails. This attitude has made it difficult for them to take the government on about more substantial issues of governance. The tax reforms, absurdly reduced to the question of contribution to the generation of the VAT revenue and its distribution, were initially framed as targetted attacks on the interests of the northern states. The argument was not in the least nuanced. Just when you thought the disagreements had been resolved and all ambiguities cleared, then would something erupt from another direction.
The latest is the observation of a member of the PDP from Sokoto, Mr. Abdussamad Dasuki, that there are marked differences between the gazetted copy of the tax reforms laws to which the President appended his signature and the harmonised version that was processed through the National Assembly. This is a very serious charge that hints at forgery but was typically started and communicated as a rumour. Sections of the tax document, the aggrieved legislator claims, were tampered with in a way that could undermine the civil liberties of Nigerians while raising questions of executive interference in legislative matters. The sections in question are, among other provisions, said to confer enforcement powers on the Nigerian Revenue Service in disregard of the powers of the courts to mandate such actions. The sub-text of this complaint that has not been revealed to Nigerians is probably the fear that this section of the law could be turned into a cudgel to bludgeon opposition figures, in one word, weaponised in the manner that Abuja has been accused of the weaponisation of the EFCC. That matter was addressed in this space last week. If Hon. Dasuki and his supporters are correct, the alleged forgery by the executive amounts to a usurpation of the legislative powers of the National Assembly, which in this context is an impeachable offense. Although it has denied the charge, the response of the executive has been mostly tepid, in fact bored, perhaps due to the fact that it views the allegations as a last-ditch attempt to stall the implementation of the tax laws which are to come into effect in just over a week.
Dasuki’s seems to be the lone voice in the wilderness. While the usual suspects in the LP and ADC, the tweet-making Peter Obi and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, whose ADC has refused to gain traction, have amplified the complaint, the silence from the two chambers of the National Assembly has been deafening. But for one or two other voices that have joined that of Mr. Dasuki in the House, not one person has spoken from the Senate. Yet, the tax documents went through both chambers. What does this tell us? That the other legislators, who we must assume lack the painstaking attentiveness of Hon. Dasuki, think little of his fears or do not share them at all? If the response from Abuja, through the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, is considered inadequate, what’s stopping Hon. Dasuki, Mr. Peter Obi or Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and their legion of supporters in and out of the National Assembly from publishing the contending documents to show where the discrepancies lie? Can’t he who alleges for once prove? But the opposition is obviously more concerned about the suspension of the implementation of the tax reforms as it has demanded than proving its allegation.
One proof of its bad faith in all of this, which again harks back to my point about its uninformed opposition to the tax reforms right from the beginning of the debate, is its demand that the reforms in their entirety, rather than the sections in dispute, be suspended outright pending the resolution of the latest dispute. What is this reductive thinking aimed at? Taking a couple of sections for an entire body of laws! Sections of the reforms have before now been suspended until the dispute around them is resolved.
Why is the opposition demanding the outright suspension of the implementation of the tax laws on account of its unproven allegations against provisions in some sections? This again confirms the opposition’s unintelligent and, indeed, uneducated response to the reforms. It came to the discussions of the tax laws unprepared and has been intellectually outflanked by an executive that, if the truth must be told, has bent over backwards, over and above the call of duty, to carry along and explain its position and its planned tax reforms to an opposition that is proving not only to be deaf and dumb but is, in fact, incapable of anything except turn every issue to politics. Merry Christmas!
The post Another ambush of the tax reforms, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.
