Thank you for this thoughtful and fair assessment. I appreciate the generosity of your reading and, more importantly, the structural lens you bring to the issue. I agree that many of the constraints were environmental rather than individual, and that limited institutional support shapes what is realistically achievable
While low tax collection clearly constrains Nigeria’s fiscal capacity, I would argue that corruption is a more decisive bottleneck—both analytically and practically—than the tax-to-GDP ratio itself.
First, corruption weakens tax collection in the first place. Leakage, informal exemptions, weak enforcement, and negotiated compliance mean that even existing tax laws are not fully realized in revenue. In this sense, corruption is upstream of the tax problem: improving integrity and enforcement would likely raise effective tax collection without changing nominal tax rates. Many countries with comparable income levels collect more taxes not because their citizens are taxed more aggressively, but because compliance is higher and leakages are lower.
Second, corruption distorts how whatever revenue is collected gets allocated and spent. Even under current fiscal constraints, the marginal naira lost to misappropriation, inflated contracts, or politically motivated spending directly crowds out funding for universities, laboratories, and research grants. This is crucial: the issue is not only that the budget is small, but that within that small budget, research and higher education are systematically deprioritized or underfunded due to rent-seeking incentives that favor short-term, visible projects over long-term capacity building.
What do you think are the most important actions that could be taken to fight corruption in Nigeria right now? This is obviously a really big question, and I do not expect you to have a complete solution to this problem; I’m just curious to get your thoughts.
Is it about making the budget and how the government spends money more transparent, so people know exactly how much money is supposed to be going to any particular thing? Is it about better law enforcement to crack down on corruption (or is there also a problem that many of the people who are supposed to fight corruption are also likely to be corrupt themselves?)? Do we need more independent journalism to discover and highlight acts of corruption? Is there a problem that much of the illicit proceeds from corruption are channeled overseas, so we need governments in Europe, U.S., the Middle East, to help discover illegal flows and freeze these assets? Or something else?
My understanding is that for a country to successfully get rid of corruption, it really takes a mindset shift from the society at large: acknowledge the devastation that corruption causes and stop thinking of taking bribes or grifting public funds as something normal and acceptable. Getting to that point can take a long time, but one has to start somewhere.
Thank you for this thoughtful and fair assessment. I appreciate the generosity of your reading and, more importantly, the structural lens you bring to the issue. I agree that many of the constraints were environmental rather than individual, and that limited institutional support shapes what is realistically achievable
While low tax collection clearly constrains Nigeria’s fiscal capacity, I would argue that corruption is a more decisive bottleneck—both analytically and practically—than the tax-to-GDP ratio itself.
First, corruption weakens tax collection in the first place. Leakage, informal exemptions, weak enforcement, and negotiated compliance mean that even existing tax laws are not fully realized in revenue. In this sense, corruption is upstream of the tax problem: improving integrity and enforcement would likely raise effective tax collection without changing nominal tax rates. Many countries with comparable income levels collect more taxes not because their citizens are taxed more aggressively, but because compliance is higher and leakages are lower.
Second, corruption distorts how whatever revenue is collected gets allocated and spent. Even under current fiscal constraints, the marginal naira lost to misappropriation, inflated contracts, or politically motivated spending directly crowds out funding for universities, laboratories, and research grants. This is crucial: the issue is not only that the budget is small, but that within that small budget, research and higher education are systematically deprioritized or underfunded due to rent-seeking incentives that favor short-term, visible projects over long-term capacity building.
What do you think are the most important actions that could be taken to fight corruption in Nigeria right now? This is obviously a really big question, and I do not expect you to have a complete solution to this problem; I’m just curious to get your thoughts.
Is it about making the budget and how the government spends money more transparent, so people know exactly how much money is supposed to be going to any particular thing? Is it about better law enforcement to crack down on corruption (or is there also a problem that many of the people who are supposed to fight corruption are also likely to be corrupt themselves?)? Do we need more independent journalism to discover and highlight acts of corruption? Is there a problem that much of the illicit proceeds from corruption are channeled overseas, so we need governments in Europe, U.S., the Middle East, to help discover illegal flows and freeze these assets? Or something else?
My understanding is that for a country to successfully get rid of corruption, it really takes a mindset shift from the society at large: acknowledge the devastation that corruption causes and stop thinking of taking bribes or grifting public funds as something normal and acceptable. Getting to that point can take a long time, but one has to start somewhere.