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Charity organisation, Oxfam, has faulted the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Article IV, urging the Federal Government to increase the current 7.5 per cent Value Added Tax (VAT) and remove subsidy on fuel to “promote long-term growth”.
Oxfam, in a statement in Abuja, yesterday, said medium to long-term recovery efforts should promote fiscal and policy space that allows for increase rather than decrease in social spending, and progressive tax policies that collect sufficient revenue and redistribute wealth fairly.
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Oxfam Country Director, Dr. Vincent Ahonsi said: “A sharp increase in VAT will widen the inequality gap in Nigeria and may plunge more Nigerians into extreme poverty. In Nigeria, the two richest billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 63 million Nigerians.”
“Instead, Nigeria should tax the wealthy and invest the trillions that could be raised into social services and infrastructure, climate adaptation, improvement of early warning systems for extreme weather, helping poor farmers to buy weather-indexed crop insurance, and researching seeds that can better cope with droughts.”
The organisation said rather than putting further burden on the bottom 99 per cent of Nigerians, government should “claw back the gains made by billionaires by taxing the huge new wealth made since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic through permanent wealth and capital taxes.”
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