When a tax law is an illegality

What began as a routine legislative reform of the Nigerian tax system by the Bola Tinubu administration has transmogrified and metastasized into an allegation of unexampled transmutation of a duly passed law to an illegality.

It’s by now well known that a law passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the president may have been materially altered after assent and then presented to the public as binding law. If this allegation is established beyond all shadows of doubt, Nigeria would be confronting the specter of an illegality fraudulently constituted as law.

Interestingly, the discovery wasn’t brought to public notice by secretive, conscientious whistleblowers in the bureaucracy or from eagle-eyed civil society audits. It came from within the legislature itself.

A member of the House of Representatives, Abdulsammad Dasuki, raised a point of privilege after personally comparing the harmonised bill passed by both chambers with the version of the tax laws published in the official gazette. He found that the documents did not match.

His discovery was the product of days of rigorous, studious and painstaking examination of Votes and Proceedings, committee harmonisation records and the gazetted text. He realised that he voted for one thing, but the country was being governed by another.

That intervention sparked a chain reaction. Other lawmakers requested certified true copies of the assented bill to verify whether the president had signed the same text that was now in circulation. According to multiple reports, those requests were denied. The refusal to release certified copies deepened suspicion and transformed what could have been dismissed as a clerical misunderstanding into a full-blown institutional crisis.

 When legislators are blocked from seeing the law that they passed and that the president signed, the issue verges on criminal constitutional transgression that must not be swept under the carpet.

While full official disclosure is still pending, several discrepancies have been repeatedly cited by lawmakers, journalists and civil society groups. These include expansions of the discretionary powers of tax authorities beyond what the National Assembly approved, alterations to reporting and oversight obligations, changes in enforcement thresholds, and adjustments that potentially increase executive control over revenue administration.

These are not innocent, unintentional clerical slips. They go to the meaning, scope and intent of the law. In short, they change who has power to tax Nigerians, how that power is exercised and to whom it is accountable.

The distinction matters. All legislative systems experience clerical errors. A misplaced word or a misnumbered section does not invalidate a statute. But when alterations confer new powers, remove safeguards, or shift institutional balance, they cross from error into illegality.

A gazette cannot lawfully create what the legislature did not enact or what the president did not assent to. Publication is supposed to merely provide evidence of the existence of the law. It can invent a law that hasn’t been passed.

The official responses so far have been evasive and contradictory. Government representatives initially insisted that there was only one authentic version of the law and that claims of alteration were partisan, ill-natured rumors. But that posture is difficult to reconcile with subsequent developments.

For example, a December 26, 2025, press statement signed by Akin Rotimi, House Spokesman and Chairman of the House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, said the National Assembly has now constituted an ad hoc committee to investigate the sequence of events from harmonisation to assent to gazetting.

More tellingly, Rotimi said, the leadership of the legislature has directed that the tax laws be re-gazetted and that certified true copies of the versions duly passed by both chambers be issued.

Re-gazetting is not a neutral act. It is an implicit admission that the existing gazette cannot be confidently treated as an accurate record of legislative intent. If nothing were amiss, there would be nothing to authenticate. The attempt to frame this as a routine administrative clarification rings hollow. Laws are not re-gazetted in the absence of doubt about their authenticity.

Supporters of the government have urged the public to trust the president’s integrity and to avoid speculation. The issue, however, is not whether the president is personally trustworthy but whether the law now being enforced is the law he signed. No amount of rhetorical reassurance can substitute for producing the signed text and allowing a side-by-side comparison with the gazetted version.

There is no precedent in the world that I have found for this kind of illegality. In the United States, the much-cited Deficit Reduction Act controversy of 2006 involved a discrepancy between House and Senate versions due to a clerical transmission error. The president signed the enrolled bill that was presented to him.

Courts upheld it under the enrolled bill doctrine, which treats the signed text as conclusive. Crucially, there was no claim that the law was altered after presidential assent.

In the Philippines, in 1964, there was a case where the wrong version of a bill was signed by the president. Legislative leaders later disowned the enrolled copy and treated the signature as invalid. Again, the error occurred before or at assent, not after. Once discovered, it was confronted as a mistake. It wasn’t normalised.

Nigeria’s case, if the allegations are borne out, is more disturbing. Here, the claim is that the president signed the correct bill but that the authoritative law published afterward materially departs from it.

Comparative constitutional practice offers no comfort here. Stable legal systems do not recognise post-assent textual mutation as valid law. Where gazetting errors occur, they are corrected. They do not become the basis for enforcement.

This raises an unavoidable question: why would anyone alter a law after it has been passed and signed? Motives can only be inferred from circumstantial evidence, but the inferences are troubling.

 Expanding the powers of tax authorities in a period of fiscal stress creates incentives for bureaucratic overreach. Removing or weakening legislative-oversight provisions reduces accountability. Centralizing discretion in the executive arm simplifies revenue extraction while insulating decision makers from scrutiny. These are not abstract possibilities. They align closely with the specific alterations that have been alleged.

There is an even more unsettling implication. If a major tax reform law can be altered after assent without immediate detection, what confidence can citizens have in the integrity of other statutes? Nigeria has passed hundreds of laws over the years, many of them technical, complex and rarely scrutinised line by line after gazetting. The discovery of this discrepancy raises the chilling possibility that post-assent alterations may not be unprecedented in practice.

That possibility should alarm every Nigerian regardless of political affiliation. Law is the foundation of collective life. If the text of the law is unstable, if it can be surreptitiously modified after constitutional procedures have been completed, then legality itself becomes provisional. Governance slides from rule of law to rule by document manipulation.

The seriousness of this violation cannot be overstated. If officials altered the tax law knowingly, they did not merely breach administrative rules. They subverted the Constitution. Such conduct would amount to forgery, abuse of office and an assault on democratic sovereignty. It would mean that Nigerians are being taxed under provisions that were never lawfully enacted.

This is why a thorough, transparent investigation is not optional. It must establish a clear documentary chain: the harmonised bill passed by both chambers, the exact text transmitted for assent, the document signed by the president and the version published in the gazette. Any divergence must be accounted for, step by step, with named responsibility. Institutional reviews that end in vague recommendations will not suffice.

If culpability is established, punishment must be severe. Anything less would invite repetition. As I always say, there is no greater enabler of habitual relapses into the same crime than the absence of consequences for committing the crimes.

 The alteration of law after assent is not a victimless bureaucratic shortcut. It is a constitutional crime with nationwide consequences. Deterrence requires more than quiet corrections. It requires accountability that is visible, proportionate and unmistakable.

This episode can either be buried under procedural language and political loyalty, or it can become a moment of constitutional self-correction. A tax law that is an illegality cannot be the foundation of fiscal reform. The integrity of the lawmaking process is itself a public good. Without it, no reform, however well intentioned, can claim legitimacy.

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