The federal government has announced that the National Assembly will pass the controversial tax reform bills into law by the end of the first quarter (Q1) of 2025.
The disclosure was made by Taiwo Oyedele, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Tax Policy and Fiscal Reforms over the weekend.
He said the implementation of the tax reform bills will commence in July 2025.
President Bola Tinubu submitted the four tax reform bills to the National Assembly on October 13, 2024, amidst criticism from leaders, particularly from those who labelled the bills as anti-north.
However, the bills recently received the backing of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), which also proposed a new “equitable” sharing formula for Value Added Tax (VAT).
“I need to talk about the tax reforms. Part of the expectation is we expect the tax reforms to be approved, particularly the tax reform bills in 2025.
“Our expectation is before the end of Q1 and therefore, we can give notice to taxpayers to prepare themselves with capacity and begin to implement around 1st of July,” he said.
On the removal of fuel subsidy, Oyedele said that the decision was crucial towards economic reform.
“Removing subsidies is the best decision we made as a country. And we can now say that for once, subsidy is gone.
“We were living on window-dressed realities. If you look back to about two years ago, naira exchange rate was N450 depending on who you asked. But was our exchange rate really N450? If you wanted to buy petrol, it was under N200 per litre, but was it really under N200 per litre? “There wasn’t band A at the time. Electricity was what time at the time, but was that really the price? A country can afford to sell petrol at N200 per litre if you can afford it. But there is everything wrong if you can not afford it.
“I am a parent and would like to send my kids to school. If I can afford a school of N200 million her term, no problem. But if I cannot, they will do just the first term and won’t be able to continue their education. Maybe they should go to a school for N200,000 per term.
“So, Nigeria was doing worse than it ought to, and then we had this sense of “our economy was not doing great”. We thought that our economy was the largest in Africa.
“Our GDP was around N450 million dollars. We thought our per capita income is about $2, 000 per person but it was not up to that.”