Of beggars and taxes

By Rose Moses

There is this story of a ‘blind beggar’ that usually stationed himself with a plate for alms at the foot of a bridge in Lagos. On this particular day, a passer-by attempted stealing from his plate and the ‘beggar’ gave him a hot chase for the money.

How did he see the non-blind thief? Your guess is as good as mine. But those familiar with the area identified the ‘blind bagger’ as a permanent feature at that spot over the years. He would resume there every morning to beg and close late in the evening.

After the incident, though, no one ever saw the beggar there again. He obviously changed location, after his bubble was busted.

Some beggars in Lagos are actually said to make a lot of money, enough to build houses they rent to hard working people, whose taxes are probably deducted at source from their not-so-impressive salaries.

So, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Minister of Finance, may have a point, after all, when she reportedly said that baggers should pay tax on their income, since ‘proceeds from begging are taxable.’

The minister, while delivering a lecture at PWC’s Business School, last week, had argued that some beggars were earning millions, and that government would look at their lifestyles and tax them.

Her words: “You are supposed to pay taxes, even if your means of income is begging.”

Granted that some Lagos beggars may be making cool money from the ‘venture’, but is that good reason to ask beggars to pay tax? I don’t think so. Instead, it refreshes ones’ memory to 15th Century French history, when their monarchs were said to have exercised unlimited powers, declaring themselves as “God” on earth.

Those leaders engaged themselves in luxurious and extravagant lifestyle, especially at the Royal Court of Versailles. Their elitist and predatory governance, according to a financial expert, blinded them from focusing on fiscal arrangements that favoured the large population of extremely disgruntled and angry poor French citizens.

In a chat during the week with Professor Marius Emeka Adimmadu of the African Center for Economic Research and Public Policy Analysis, he recalled that it was this extravagant and defective governance that formed the political cause of all four French revolutions by the common people, the lower clergy and provincial nobles.

This epidemic of arrogance of power, he said, invariably, also led to the glorious revolution in England in 1688.

Relating the above scenario to present day Nigeria is the fact that we have a small minority of very powerful political elites and their cronies, stupendously rich along with their religious elites and subordinates. At the base is a large mass of extremely poor people, which Prof Adimmadu said, nearly approximates the three French class structures prior to the French uprising, that is, the clergy, the nobles and the common people.

The Nobles and the Clergy paid taxes to the Monarch, who exploited the common people in various ways. Even the street beggars were forced to pay tax, while the elites or the First Estate were exempted from tax liabilities.

In Nigeria where majority of those who evade taxes are mostly the supper rich; it is obvious that the poor are roundly exploited by the rich. Ideally, these very wealthy Nigerians should be the target and should not be left out in the campaign to enlarge the tax net. Not the beggars, most of who just manage to survive and are mostly victims of bad leadership.

In the face of chants of discontent and dissatisfaction among the nation’s more than 250 tribes, intense geopolitical tensions and increasing spate of other social crimes such as kidnappings, armed robbery, cultism, etc, the idea of having beggars, and not even some churches and their leaders that live so large, to pay tax should be the least of government’s problem at this time.

Currently mired in an unabated recession as a result of fragile dependence on a single commodity —petroleum, which in effect is threatened by global oil crisis, what should rather preoccupy government’s time is how to provide safety valves to cushion the cumulative impact of the recession on citizens. And to also reduce the growing trend of ‘executive beggars’ that openly parade public and private offices.

Add these executive beggars to the increasing population of long suffering beggars on our cities and streets, what you get is a mass of desperate citizens that hardly can survive the harsh economic realities of the day.

The nation’s finance minister, more than anyone else, knows that government fiscal objective should be to create economic expansion and widespread prosperity without which it will be hard to achieve economic buoyancy that improves tax capacity and internal stability.

Pushing the mass of extremely poor citizens to a breaking point has always yielded negative result for any country.

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