Columnist

Governors are the chief security officers of their states. The title is not one of those sycophantic labels to massage their ego. That is why they also receive security votes to ensure they adequately perform the responsibility. State governors’ poor deployment of their states’ so-called security votes and other security budgets in tackling insecurity has […]

For obvious reasons, subnational governments are obsessed with maximising internally generated revenue. The more, the merrier. In an overly simplified conceptualization, the thinking is that more IGR affords the government an enhanced capacity to provide good governance. But government income growth comes at various costs to the government and the citizens. The presence of trade-offs […]

A comprehensive taxpayer database is an essential requirement for effective tax-based IGR expansion. Every subnational government is better off collecting taxes from registered taxpayers. The leading cause of many state and local governments’ underwhelming results in their independent revenue generation is their failure to build such databases. That is why direct tax (particularly personal income […]

The differences in the independent revenue mobilisation performance of Nigeria’s subnational governments depend significantly on their relative fiscal capacities, the strength of revenue collection institutions, the degree of the entrepreneurial mindset of their leadership, the extent of technology adaptation and other kindred factors. As should be expected, each subnational government strives to build IGR growth […]

The president’s confirmation of the well-known thieving of local government fiscal allocations by many state governors and local government chairpersons presents yet another exciting dimension to the poor optimization of the subnational government’s internally generated revenue capacity. Statutory funding to subnational governments and the independently generated revenue interconnect in a dynamic virtuous circle. Unhampered, allocated […]