“Enough is enough!” Former President of CAN Requests Tinubu to Eliminate Multiple Taxes
Dr. Samson Ayokunle, a former president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), has requested that President Bola Tinubu put an end to the federal and state governments’ repeated taxes on the starving people of Nigeria.
This was stated on Friday on a TV programme, Ayokunle, who is also a past president of the Nigerian Baptist Convention.
In order to access the nation’s closed gold mines, he pleaded with the President to unleash investment in the mining and agricultural industries and open up the nation’s economy.
“Let’s explore various facets of our economy.” Nigeria is wealthy; let’s investigate rather than just tax. Taxing people will lead to individual deaths. If you continue to burden them, they will eventually die, and if they die without accomplishing their dreams, you will be held responsible.
“I recognise that the President of Nigeria wants to help the people of Nigeria, but he should not raise taxes further because the status quo is intolerable.”How are people going to survive? He questioned, “How will people breathe?”
With the way things are going with the additional taxes and power bill hikes among other things, many people do not know what will happen to them tomorrow. Where are these funds going to be spent? You know how much you pay them each month, don’t you? “Do you want to drive them out of the country or kill them?” he said.
In light of the resources available to the country and its performance, he bemoaned the fact that Nigeria is many years behind.
“The state of the economy is dire. Nigerians are going through never-before-seen suffering. He remarked, “I’m not sure how to categorise this—as hyper-inflation or something else. “It is hard for Nigerians to subsist due to the unimaginably high cost of goods.”
“The new administration took some very good steps and they also took some steps, if not many steps backwards,” stated the former president of CAN.
He lambasted the Tinubu administration for its hurried elimination of the petrol subsidy. “The haste without taking the implications of the removal of petrol subsidies into account, queue by queue.”
“This administration is attempting to handle the foreign exchange problem, but they are not having success. He declared that “something drastic must be done” and that young people could “no longer take it because hope deferred makes the heart weary” due to the dire economic conditions.
He did, however, praise the present administration’s student loan programme.
In order to combat food inflation, he suggested, the government should concentrate on funding the agricultural sector.