Oxfam seeks systemic increase in taxation of wealthy Nigerians, companies

Oxfam Nigeria has called on the federal government to increase the tax of wealthy Nigerians by between two and three percent, according to their wealth.

A statement by Country Director Oxfam, Dr. Vincent Ahonsi, while reacting to World Bank report released recently, said a wealth tax of 2% on the millionaires, 3% on those with wealth above $50 million and 5% on the Nigerian billionaires would raise $3.2 billion dollars annually.

“Oxfam is calling on governments to introduce one-off solidarity wealth taxes and windfall taxes to end crisis profiteering. Government should permanently increase taxes on the richest one percent, for example to at least 60 percent of their income from labor and capital, with higher rates for multi-millionaires and billionaires. Governments must especially raise taxes on capital gains, which are subject to lower tax rates than other forms of income.

“Tax the wealth of the richest 1 percent at rates high enough to significantly reduce the numbers and wealth of the richest people, and redistribute these resources. This includes implementing inheritance, property and land taxes, as well as net wealth taxes,” he recommended.

According to Ahonsi, money from the tax increase would be enough to double health spending, saying Nigeria has one of the lowest health budgets in the world while the richest one percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population.

He said a new Oxfam report on Monday revealed that, “for over five years, Nigeria spent an average of 49% of its revenue on debt servicing, and in 2020, before COVID, this was expected to be 29% or $6 billion. This amount was almost four times the education and social protection budgets, six times the health budget and 14 times the agriculture budget. Despite Nigeria having one of the lowest tax to GDP ratios in the world with just 3.6% in 2019, Nigeria spent 80.6% of its revenue on debt servicing in 2022.

He said three quarters of the world’s governments are planning austerity-driven public sector spending cuts including on healthcare and education by $7.8 trillion over the next five years.

He said Oxfam is calling for a systemic and wide-ranging increase in taxation of the super-rich to claw back crisis gains driven by public money and profiteering. Decades of tax cuts for the richest and corporations have fueled inequality, with the poorest people in many countries paying higher tax rates than billionaires.

“Taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today’s overlapping crises. It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all ships just the superyachts.”