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Explore our work with partners, globally and locally, to tackle social and economic injustice using a human rights lens.
Building Trust in Nigeria’s Tax Reforms: The PayTax4Wetin? Policy Dialogue
On 23 July 2026 in Abuja, Nigeria, GI-ESCR spearheaded ‘PayTax4Wetin? Funding Quality Public Services to Build Trust in Nigeria’s Tax Laws’, a policy dialogue organised with the Tax Justice and Governance Platform, Public Services International (PSI), CODE, BudgIT, Gatefield Foundation and CAPPA. The event brought together the Office of the Tax Ombud (OTO), FCT-IRS, smallholder farmers, teachers’ and labour unions, businesswomen and tax justice campaigners to examine what the country’s new tax reforms have delivered so far.
The dialogue reinforced the need for concrete commitments to revenue transparency, the protection of social spending and a clearer public trail from tax collection to expenditure. It also highlighted that corporations and high-net-worth individuals must pay their fair share, with revenue directed towards health, education, water, energy and other quality public services. In doing so, it framed fiscal policy as a means through which the government can fulfil economic and social rights and strengthen the social contract.
The Office of the Tax Ombud: A Young Institution Under Scrutiny
The Office of the Tax Ombud (OTO) used the session to introduce itself formally as an independent body established under the National Assembly to mediate complaints between taxpayers and revenue authorities.
During the discussions, several participants raised concerns about the lack of public awareness of the institution. Its representatives, Mr Timothy Usman and Mr Haruna Pukuma, shared that plans were under way to conduct public awareness campaigns on the mandate of the office. They also invited civil society to collaborate on this process, since the institution has only a handful of offices nationwide.
The OTO's constructive engagement with participating organisations and movements raised the prospect of regular dialogue with civil society and a stronger focus on the systemic effects of tax policy alongside its role in addressing individual complaints.
One of the dialogue’s main political takeaways was the opportunity to strengthen the newly established Tax Ombud Office. Ensuring that the Office is adequately funded will be central to whether it can fulfil this potential.
The Reforms, Six Months On: What Nigerians Had to Say
Panel One: Fiscal Reforms and Tax Systems in Recent Times: The People’s Experience
This panel gave the floor to the people the reform was meant to protect.
Ms Wakilat Okeji, from the Smallholder Women Farmers Organisation of Nigeria (SWOFON), shared that most of the organisation’s members do not experience the reforms through direct taxation at all, since they operate at a micro-scale and are largely informal. The impact of the tax reforms instead reaches them through input costs: doubled fertiliser costs, doubled transport costs to market and doubled labour costs, as everyone along the chain raises prices to protect their own margins. The one direct point of contact with taxation for most members is the market levy paid when produce is sold. As she wrapped up, Ms. Wakilat was blunt that there has been no cushioning mechanism during the implementation of the tax reforms and that the outlook is bleak so far 'we have been surviving and we cannot see a way out in sight.'
Dr Clinton Ikpitibo from the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) confirmed that all teachers now fall within the tax net following the consolidation of sector-specific levies, including the Tertiary Education Trust Fund contribution and the 4 per cent development levy. He was careful to say that the union supports taxation in principle, provided it produces measurable improvements, but raised an open question: ‘How far is it improving the lives of teachers?’ The feeling so far is that, from the union’s perspective, the reforms, including those taking place at the Ministry of Education, have not visibly improved classroom conditions. The promised new salary structures have not been implemented and teachers, like everyone else, are absorbing rising rents, transport costs and the increasing cost of goods in the market. This means that, in practice, the reforms have reduced real incomes without a compensating gain.
Princess Omotola Omole from the Association of Nigerian Women Business Network (ANWBN) detailed how the new tax obligations are compounding an already difficult environment of high borrowing costs and weak infrastructure for businesswomen. She also argued that asking citizens to adapt to the new taxes before the state has delivered basic conditions such as good roads, reliable electricity and trust in the system does not make paying taxes feel legitimate: ‘Before we think about the tax reform, first of all think about the reform of the people who are going to pay the tax.’
Finally, Celestine Odo from ActionAid Nigeria linked the issue of subsidy removal for fuel, electricity and education, including the replacement of bursaries with student loans, directly to a documented rise in poverty. He described a widening gap between the government’s official growth narrative, which includes stabilising inflation, strengthening the naira, growing reserves and rising revenue, and the lived realities of Nigerians, who he said were facing a poverty emergency. He added that there was a disconnect between raising revenue and delivering visible services, stating: ‘Every Nigerian is a local government chairman of his or her own household,’ as people provide their own generators, water and security.
Chika Okoh from International Budget Partnership (IBP) Nigeria, who moderated the panel, closed the discussions by adding that policy and legislation mean little if their effects on people are not examined. She noted that Nigeria’s social protection system is ‘totally inadequate’ and was not strengthened ahead of the reforms. Most pointedly, she explained that even the relief provisions written into the new tax laws to protect vulnerable groups, such as education and housing allowances, are structured around salaried, formal employment, meaning that a woman farmer or market trader has no way to access them.
Panel Two: Fiscal Reforms as a Tool for Financing the Social Contract
The second panel turned to a more relational question: does paying tax still feel like a two-way bargain with the state? Kofoworola from Gatefield, who moderated the session, opened it by naming the core tension directly: a social contract runs on reciprocity, and the day’s evidence showed a system in which that reciprocity felt broken from the citizens’ perspective. She referred to Ms. Wakilat Okeji from SWOFON's testimony, adding that ‘the reality of the smallholder farmer is the reality of everyday people’, and framed the panel’s central question around accountability among tax collectors.
Victor Arokoyo from Christian Aid framed tax as an instrument of social accountability. He argued that citizens reflexively demand accountability when money goes missing from a private association to which they belong, but that instinct does not transfer to public funds because most people cannot see, or have never been shown, the line connecting what they pay to what the state does with it. As a partial fix, Victor pointed to local ‘tax-for-service’ arrangements, in which market associations negotiate for an agreed share of collected levies to be visibly reinvested in the same market, as a small but replicable model for restoring trust. He closed by stressing the need to reframe the people’s relationship with the government: the people Nigerians call governors and presidents are not their bosses. They are their employees, paid with public money, and civil society’s role is to help citizens hold that relationship to account.
Aminata Talatu from the Society for Women in Taxation described the association’s role as a bridge between tax authorities and women taxpayers, running sensitisation visits to markets and rural communities and offering training and support where complaints arise. She named education as the real lever: people who understand their obligations and rights under the new laws are better positioned to hold government accountable. This was a capacity-building argument rather than one focused purely on awareness.
Dr Alhasan Usaman from the Federal Capital Territory Internal Revenue Service challenged the framing running through much of the day, arguing that public services cannot be separated from tax compliance: government cannot be expected to deliver the output if citizens do not provide the input. He opened by defining the social contract narrowly and technically: citizens agree to honestly declare their taxes, government promises to convert that revenue into public goods and the revenue authority itself sits outside that contract, merely collecting revenue on the government’s behalf. The agency stressed this distinction and noted that its own staff also pay tax. Its central argument was an ‘input before output’ framing, borrowed explicitly from production theory: government cannot be blamed for undelivered services if the input, tax compliance, has not been fully provided.
The panel’s clearest takeaway was a reframing offered by Kofoworola rather than a resolution: Nigerians do not need to wait passively for government to deliver the other half of the contract. They need to feel empowered to demand it, ask questions and participate in the tax process itself, rather than engaging only at election time.
Reflections from the Floor
Across both panels, participants pushed the conversation beyond the panel testimony by questioning how much of today’s hardship was genuinely driven by the reforms and how much resulted from global economic shocks. They also highlighted everyday extortion carried out under the label of ‘levy’ and questioned why disability inclusion had no concrete mechanism within the campaign’s framework. Several participants called for a more confrontational next step: naming specific officials who should answer these concerns directly, rather than leaving the discussion within civil society alone.
The Campaign’s Formal Demands
Closing the day, GI-ESCR, together with its partners, addressed the media by formally launching PayTax4Wetin? and sharing the campaign’s documented demands. The campaign’s advocacy asks call for the transparent and accountable implementation of Nigeria’s tax reforms and for the resulting revenue to fund better public services. The statement notes that Nigeria’s four reform laws, in force since January 2026, hold real progressive potential, including new rules on multinational and digital economy taxation, but stresses that this potential depends entirely on enforcement and transparency.
The statement concluded with demands falling into two categories. On transparency and accountability, it calls for public, regularly updated data on tax collection, compliance and the cost of exemptions, mandatory financial disclosure for multinationals, an adequately resourced and genuinely independent Tax Ombud Office that is open to civil society participation, a possible standing advisory council on tax policy, a concrete enforcement plan for taxing the digital economy and a path to progressively raise the multinational tax rate from 15 to 25 per cent. On funding public services, it calls for social spending to be protected from debt servicing, time-bound commitments to meet international benchmarks for education, equivalent to 4 to 6 per cent of GDP, and health spending, equivalent to 5 to 6 per cent of GDP, expanded and reliable investment in energy and water and a transparent, citizen-facing public spending framework backed by independent audits with real enforcement power.
Find the full statement:
Find the complete list of demands:
These advocacy efforts are backed by national partners, who bring expertise in budget tracking, tax policy, public service delivery, human rights and citizen mobilisation. Through strategic collaboration, including panel sessions, technical breakout roundtables and concrete commitment setting, the initiative aims to build an accountability roadmap and elevate the national debate on fair, progressive taxation ahead of the 2027 elections.
A post-dialogue accountability-tracking process is planned to begin in August 2026, creating a mechanism to follow commitments and monitor their implementation.
The Abuja Mission
The bilateral advocacy meetings and the PayTax4Wetin? policy dialogue formed complementary parts of the same Abuja mission. The meetings opened channels with institutions responsible for implementing the reforms, while the dialogue brought together public authorities, civil society organisations, trade unions, farmers and businesswomen to examine the implementation of the reforms and discuss their effects on people’s lives. Together, they connected institutional engagement with public participation and created a foundation for continued dialogue, collaboration and accountability.
Across both parts of the mission, one message was consistent: the success of Nigeria’s tax reform will be measured by whether people can see who pays, understand how much is collected, follow where the money goes and experience meaningful improvements in public services. Building on the Abuja mission, GI-ESCR and its partners plan to follow up on the initial dialogues, advance the campaign’s advocacy asks and pursue the channels for collaboration raised by policymakers, while continuing to support an adequately resourced and independent Office of the Tax Ombud, advocate for permanent channels for civil society participation and press for transparent revenue collection and public spending that strengthens essential services.
This work advances GI-ESCR’s strategic commitment to public services, tax justice and the fulfilment of economic, social and cultural rights within a care-centred society. It also reflects its theory of change across three interconnected areas: strengthening public narratives around taxation, building alliances across trade unions, farmers’ associations, women’s business networks, faith-based organisations and government revenue bodies and engaging institutional frameworks so that public institutions uphold their responsibilities under the social contract.
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