“Why I Pay Taxes?” by Salisu Na’inna Dambatta,
“As a villager, I loathed paying taxes, or what they called revenue, at our weekly open-air market,” said Maitabo, the livestock trader who is now an industrialist in the big city where he established factories that turned out a basket of consumers goods, including polished rice.
He said he spent the first 40 years of his life in his native village without electricity. There was no smooth, all-season motorable road to his village either. The only school in the district was in Alkarya, the district headquarters of his Karkara collection of hamlets, tiny villages, and homesteads.
Maitabo said he previously viewed paying the community tax and cattle tax to the local leaders as unnecessary, dishing money out to big men who dress nicely, ride bicycles, even motorcycles, and build cemented houses with roofs made of shiny corrugated iron sheets.
However, as his livestock trade expanded and the necessity for Maitabo to hire articulated trailers to convey his wares from the big livestock markets where he buys them in hundreds to far-flung consumption centers of Kano, Ibadan, Warri, Abuja, Benin, Uyo, Yenagoa, Port Harcourt and Okigwe near Umuahia, he appreciated that the wide, smooth and tarred highways plied by the trailers were important facilitators for his flourishing lucrative trade.
He also realized that the trailers conveying his livestock traveled through thick forests where security personnel was stationed to protect travelers from marauders. The trailers were driven on bridges built by the government to cross both big rivers and streams: the days of using risky ferries to cross rivers were over.
As an industrialist who graduated from the livestock trade and lived in rural Nigeria 50 years ago, he is now confronted with the importance and benefits of collecting taxes. And he no longer loathes paying taxes as he did previously. He nowadays encourages other business owners and everyone who will listen to him to pay taxes as and when due.
His favorite justification for his willingness to pay taxes was the improvement he noticed in the well-being of people in his village during a visit. The authorities have provided a laterite road linking his village to other towns; a windmill that draws potable water from a deep well for his community; a dispensary that meets the health care needs of a cluster of villages including his home village, and the most wonderful of all, the electricity that was wired to the village by the Rural Electrification Authority.
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Maitabo will tell his listeners that it was long after he enjoyed various government services that it dawned on him that the livestock tax he paid and the flat tax paid by all male adults in his village, contributed to the pool of money spent on providing those services in his and other neighboring villages.
Now as a dweller in a city, the owner of manufacturing plants and a fleet of trailers that bring raw materials to his factories and evacuate manufactured goods from there, he realizes that the constant electricity supplied to his factories and the smooth roads used by his articulated trucks were emplaced by the government using the very taxes he previously loathed to pay.
He now discourages tax evasion; shuns false tax entries and avoids quarrels with tax officials. Maitabo believes as the World Bank does in a Subnational Study on ease of doing business that taxpayers and businesses are interested in what they get for their taxes: quality infrastructure including good roads, a reliable railway network, functional aviation facilities, efficient seaports, continuous supply of electricity and telecommunication connectivity, which are all vital for the sound functioning of an economy.
A healthy workforce enhances economic competitiveness and productivity.
Consequently, governments invest in health care. The government also spends on imparting relevant skills to improve the efficiency of workers. It provides tertiary education facilities such as the 37 Federal Polytechnics, 43 Federal Universities, and 27 Federal Colleges of Education where top-level human capital is nurtured to support the economy through technical innovations.
Maitabo often explains to his listeners that although the government in Nigeria charges excise, import, and export duties and collects petroleum profit tax to raise revenue to finance the operations of the security forces namely the Nigeria Police Force, the Department of State Services, the Nigerian Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Civil Defense, he noted that the bread and tea millions of Nigerians buy daily, complete with fried eggs and the meals they enjoy in countless eateries and open-air restaurants, including the pepper soup, are not taxed by the government.
Maitabo is always at his most entertaining telling people who listen to him why he pays taxes. He points out that revenues from taxes are used to compensate public servants who provide essential services, including ambulance drivers, firefighters, nurses in healthcare centers, and air traffic controllers who contribute to safe aviation in the country.
He narrates correctly that Nigerians who travel anywhere by road, sea, and air, inevitably drive on government-provided roads, use safe sea lanes cleared by the country’s maritime authority and fly out or land at beautiful airports built by the government–using money from taxes.
Maitabo admits that he benefits immensely from the services provided by the government which it pays for with money generated through taxation, and wishes that those services continue to improve sustainably, often saying, “That is why I pay taxes.”
Seunmanuel Faleye is a brand and communications strategist. He is a covert writer and an overt creative head. He publishes Apple’s Bite International Magazine.
