Ten years ago, Nigeria’s tax revenue was so low that I was close to suggesting that the tax collectors of Eastern Nigeria in the 1960s should be called in to rescue the situation.

In the 1960s, the tax collectors in my village were brutally efficient. Their tax collection system could not be evaded by any taxable adult. They used the village heads as their agents.

Sometime in April of every year, they would send the tax receipts bearing the names of every taxable adult in the village to the village head and give him a deadline for collecting the fees.

The village head responded to the tax man’s demand by sending the town crier to deliver the message. 

In the night after the tax receipts were delivered by the tax men, the town crier goes round the village with his gong announcing the arrival of the tax receipts.

He called on all taxable adults to go to the village head, pay their tax and collect receipts.

One month after the announcement, the tax men hit the village with their windowless lorry now known as “Black Maria”.

They raid every house, arrest those who had not collected their tax receipts and herded them into the windowless lorry for onward transmission to jail.

The tax fee was four pounds, while the one for the local government called “rate” was 15 shillings.  The taxes were mercilessly collected even as there was no government presence in the village.

There was no power supply, no running water. The primary school in the village was built by the village council.

The government only managed to supply the teachers. The nearest secondary school to my village was 20 miles away and the school fee was 35 pounds per annum in a village where the income of the average man in a year was less than 100 pounds. 

The school fee in the primary school was eight pounds. The village council mercifully subsidised it with two pounds per child, leaving the parents to slug it out on the payment of the balance.

Today, there is electricity in my village. Government even supplies pipe-borne water in all the streets. Secondary school is a walking distance from the village. 

Godswill Akpabio as governor of the state went as far as declaring free education at secondary school level. Consequently, just about every primary school graduate in the village heads to secondary school.

When I finished primary school in 1966, we were about 40 in the class. Only five pupils went to secondary school. 

The rest of the parents were too poor to foot the secondary school bill. And the government was not there to help despite the merciless tax the parents were paying.

The strange thing now is that no peasant farmer pays tax in that village. The tax men have practically forgotten the village tax payers.

That was why I thought we needed the tax men of the 1960s in Eastern Nigeria to rescue Nigeria from low tax revenue.

Ten years ago, Nigeria had one of the lowest tax revenue in the whole globe. Even the World Bank noted it as one of the deficiencies the federal government has to contend with.

Tax revenue was a scant 6.5 per cent of Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP). The average tax-to-GDP ratio in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is 16 per cent.

All the tiny states in the community like Benin Republic and Togo know how to collect tax. Nigeria was still learning the ropes.

The situation has changed drastically. About seven years ago, Mohammed Nami, the immediate past chairman of the then Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), now known as Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), managed to inch up tax revenue to 10 per cent of GDP before he left office.

Zacch Adedeji, the man who took over from him, vowed to push tax revenue to 18 per cent in the medium term. In less than four years in office, he has pushed it to 13 per cent.

At the current rate there are strong indications that he will meet the target in the next few years. 

Two weeks ago, Adedeji made an impressive announcement about tax revenue when he appeared on Channel Television’s “Politics Today”.

He announced that NRS raked in N27.1 trillion as tax revenue in the first seven months of 2026. That is a record breaking performance.

Nigeria’s tax revenue for 2023 was a paltry N12 trillion. That was why the federal government raised billions of dollars in foreign loans to balance the budget.

Nigeria serviced the debt with 70 per cent of its meager revenue. That left the government with the option of raising more loans to fund the capital projects in the budget.

This year the federal government has spent something close to N13 trillion on domestic debt servicing.

That is because the tax collectors were not doing their jobs well.

With the trend announced by Adedeji some weeks ago, pundits believe that Nigeria is gradually moving from the dark era when the government had to depend totally on anecdotal oil revenue for funding its budgets.

With N27 trillion so far collected as tax revenue in the first seven months of 2026, there are strong indications that tax revenue for 2026 could hit the N50 trillion target.

If that target is attained, the federal government could beat its chest as it funds 70 per cent of its budget with tax revenue. That is the way out of the excruciating pains of servicing debts with 70 per cent of the meager revenue.

The federal government will heave a sigh of relief as funds will be freed for investment in crucial infrastructure rehabilitation. 

With the recent trend in tax collection, no one needs the brutal tax collectors of Eastern Nigeria in the 1960s to do the job.

The truth is that the present government is capable of collecting taxes efficiently and is using the proceeds of the tax to improve the welfare of the people.