The Independent Media and Policy Initiative(IMPI), an advocacy group, has expressed dismay over the position of Northern elites and the controversies trailing the Tax Reform Bills currently before the National Assembly.
The group, which comprises intellectuals drawn from the media, including public and private sector players, regretted that these needless controversies were posing a distraction to the economic attributes of the bill, especially in terms of revenue generation, enterprise development and enhancement of citizens purchasing power.
At a press conference in Abuja to reel out benefits of the proposed tax bill, Ahmad Sajoh, a former Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Adamawa State, criticised the northern elites for opposing the bill, saying their fears were mostly unfounded because they failed over the years to add value to what they produce from the region.
Explaining further, he said the blood generated from the slaughter of cows is the best bye- product for producing fish feed in the world, but it is wasted on daily in Nigeria.
According to Sajoh most of the fears being nursed by the northern elites regarding the bill are baseless, lamenting that majority lacked emperical arguments to support opposition for the bill.
He linked their worries to the initial fears most Nigerians had when the issue of State Police was being mooted, saying today has been endorsed by majority of stakeholders because of the level of insecurity in the country.
Sajoh added, "I think that as a northerner and as somebody who has been in the state executive in the northern state, I can tell you very categorically that the fears of the northern government are unfounded.
"It is premised on the very wrong notion of a northern Nigeria that does not want to support productive activities. The chairman told you very clearly that it is about value addition.
"If the north had agreed that as northerners and as northern governors and northern governments, what we would do within a certain period, for example, is first and foremost to add value to the products we have, even if they are just agricultural.
"You take a cow for instance. If a northern state government can establish an abattoir that slaughters a thousand cows a day and processes it into meat, once you do a channel through which the blood gathers, blood of a thousand cattle, if you process it, it can be used for so many other things.
"The bones are valuable. The horns are valuable, the hooves are valuable, the skin, if you add value to the skin, when I was growing up, we had a Tumsa factory in Maiduguri and we had another factory in Kano where they produced shoes, bags, belts, and others. If they could only learn to begin to add value to the products we have, they would not even worry about value added tax, or any other tax for that matter, because the north is rich.
"Nasarawa state has just established a lithium processing factory. Kaduna is doing the same. So they should begin to think about adding value to the products that we produce in the north. They should begin to think productive engagement, not what is going on. So I don't think there's any need for us to begin to fear.
"In any case, the major fear was that if you transfer money in your bank in Yola or Sokoto or anywhere, the bank goes to the bank headquarters in Lagos. But this law did not say that.
"The law says because no bank pays salary from Lagos, every branch of the bank has its own budget. They know their income, they know their expenditure. They know the source of their income, so if you want to, for example say where the banks earn the money, the VAT that is where you call the derivation point, you can do it.
"For the telecom companies, they are ICT compliant. You can track every call you make to a particular location. So all these fears are unfounded.
Just like the other fears, the fear of state police is based on a misunderstanding of the term policing. Policemen are different from policing. What Amotekun is doing is policing, what JTF is doing in Maiduguri is policing, what the Zamfara and the Kastina people are doing is policing, what LASTMA is doing is policing.
"So policing is different from police, what we are saying is that we need increased policing and because we have identified that there's a need for increased policing in traffic management, we have agreed that LASTMA be put in place.
"A lot of these things are based on hysteria. If you sit down and ask him, okay, tell me what are the areas that the north will be cheated, Wallahi, he will not tell you".
In his remarks, the Chairman of IMPI, Omoniyi Akinsiju said the furore generated over the proposed sharing formula for the proceeds of VAT as contained in the bill is the typical expression of the hangover from the era of sqaubbling over who gets the lion's share from the revenue so generated.
Akinsiju argued that what should be of paramount concern to Nigerians should be to innovate and create a symbiotic fiscal relationship between the state and the people in a win-win situation.
He emphasised that for the IMPI leadership, the tax reform bill if implemented will set the country as one of the lowest tax to GDP ratios in Africa at 10.86% and on the path of inclusive growth for the benefit of all Nigerians.
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