Executive bill seeking to make for incremental changes to Nigerian tax and fiscal law and for other related matter scaled second reading at Senate plenary on Wednesday.
The debate leading to the passage of the bill was not without the insistence of the President of the Senate through the power of the gavel that the bill be discussed without the details being made available to Senators to enable them to make an informed contribution to the bill at its a consideration at plenary.
Senators Yaroe Binus (Adamawa South) and Betty Apiafi (Rivers West) separately raised points of order drawing the attention of the President of the Senate Ahmad Lawan to the non-circulation of the bill among Senators to enable them to look through its details and make informed contributions ahead of its second reading.
The President of the Senate ruled both of them out of order and maintained that the details of the bill will only be made available at the committee level.
Lawan said: “To handle that, we have already asked that our Secretariat distributes all the Acts that we want to amend and I want to urge the committee to work very assiduously as they have worked before, the committee on finance, you did so well when we considered the MTEF, I want to urge you to do better when it comes to handling the amendment.
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“Then there should be proper reporting of these laws so that we are able to compete what we are amending and what the principal Act provides for.
“This should not be compromised at all, our colleagues who raised the issue did so because they wanted to contribute but I think what we have done is still within our tradition and our convention of debating the general principles.
“The issue of revenue in Nigeria today is the major issue affecting our economy. The economy of this country like most developing economy depends on public expenditure and until we are able to get it, collate them efficiently and effectively we are not able to fund public expenditure well.
“This bill will help in generating and collecting this kind of revenue. we look forward to a time when Nigerian government will rely on it’s revenue to withing the country rather than looking abroad for some kind of support or facility to be able to fund budgets,” Lawan submitted.
Following the insistence of the President of the Senate that the bill is considered even though the detail was not available for the public.
Leading debate on the bill, Senator Yahaya Abdullahi (APC, Kebbi North), said the bill essentially seeks to promote fiscal equity by mitigating instances of regressive taxation; reforming domestic laws to align with global best practices, and introducing tax incentives for investments in infrastructure and capital markets.
The bill also seeks to support small businesses in line with ongoing ease of doing business reform, and raising revenues for the government by various fiscal measures, including a proposal to increase the rate of Value Added Tax from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent.
According to Abdullahi, the additional revenues to be made by the Federal Government when this bill becomes law will be used to fund health, education and infrastructure programmes.
“It is absolutely essential to intensify the revenue generation efforts of this administration and its commitment to ensuring that the inconvenience associated with any fiscal policy adjustments is moderated such that the poor and the vulnerable, who are most at risk, do not bear the brunt of these reforms,” Abdullahi said.
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