Whichever way the government decides, the peddling of the long knives that started with Zacchaeus in Jericho won’t end with Fowler. But the government’s answer will send an important message about how serious the government is with its reforms.
Even though he appeared to be an honest guy, doing his job as best as he could, the system was so badly tainted that anyone who held that job was viewed with suspicion. Being a rich and short man only made things worse for Zacchaeus. On his appointment as the nation’s chief tax collector in 2015, Fowler was under pressure to live up to the hype following his accomplishments as the chairman of Lagos State Internal Revenue Service , where he raised the internally generated revenue from N600 million in 1999 to N20 billion in 2015.
By 2016, FIRS had brought into the tax net 800,000 new corporate taxpayers and by the first half of 2018, tax revenue had increased by 42 per cent. Non-oil tax revenue in the same year was a record N2.852 trillion, representing more than 50 per cent of N5.3 trillion that year. Also, the challenge for countries like Nigeria is how to substantially fund their budgets from incomes not determined by the outside world, which include extractive resources, loans and grants.
The recent reclassification of Nigeria by the World Bank among the most improved countries with regards to the Ease of Doing Business, attributed substantially to the institutional reforms introduced by Fowler at FIRS, means that the future is not gloomy without oil.