Tinubu’s Tax Reset and the Rising Cost of Living: Who Really Pays in 2026?

By the start of 2026, the Nigerian economy had crossed a critical psychological threshold. For millions of households, survival, not prosperity, had become the central economic concern. Food prices climbed relentlessly, transportation costs ballooned, electricity tariffs rose, and the naira’s weakness continued to hollow out purchasing power. Wages, meanwhile, remained stubbornly stagnant. In one word: Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis swirl. This is the economic terrain into which President Bola Tinubu’s administration has launched Nigeria’s most aggressive fiscal overhaul in decades. Framed as reform, sold as necessity, and defended as inevitability, the new tax regime arrives not as a technocratic adjustment but as an additional burden on a population already stretched to its limits. The question confronting Nigerians in 2026 is no longer whether reform is needed, but who bears the cost, and who decides how much pain is acceptable. Reform in the Middle of Hardship The removal of fuel subsidies unleashed a cascade of price increases that reverberated through every sector of the economy. Transport fares surged, food inflation accelerated, and informal businesses, already operating on thin margins, struggled to survive. Electricity tariff hikes followed, further eroding household incomes and raising production costs. Currency policy adjustments compounded the crisis, making imports more expensive and local substitutes scarcer. Rather than pause to stabilize living conditions, the government pressed ahead with sweeping tax reforms. For many Nigerians, the timing alone felt punitive: a state demanding more at the precise moment its citizens had less to give. A New Tax Regime, Old Trust Deficit The overhaul rests on four major laws that replace Nigeria’s chaotic tax framework with a centralized, digitally monitored system. On paper, the logic is compelling: fewer taxes, better enforcement, broader compliance. In reality, centralization without trust risks becoming coercion by another name. Progressive tax bands and exemptions for low-income earners are cited as evidence of fairness. Yet the lived experience tells a different story. Middle-income Nigerians comprising, civil servants, professionals, and small traders, are watching their take-home pay shrink as inflation bites and long-standing reliefs disappear. What remains is a widening gap between what the state demands and what it delivers. “Widening the Net” or Tightening the Noose? Officials insist the reforms are about widening the tax net rather than increasing the burden. But a net cast over a struggling economy does not magically become lighter because it is broader. When energy costs soar, food prices spike, and wages lag inflation, taxation, no matter how elegantly designed, feels punitive. The promise that higher revenue will eventually translate into better schools, hospitals, and infrastructure rings hollow in a country where decades of oil wealth failed to produce durable public value. Nigerians have heard this argument before. Each time, they were asked to be patient. Each time, patience yielded diminishing returns. VAT and Regional Fault Lines: Old Battles, New Weapons No element of Tinubu’s tax reset better exposes Nigeria’s unresolved national question than the proposed restructuring of the Value Added Tax (VAT) sharing formula. Presented by the government as a neutral, efficiency-driven move toward derivation, the reform has instead resurrected the ghosts of Nigeria’s most bitter fiscal conflicts, conflicts never resolved, only postponed. By tilting VAT allocation more decisively toward where consumption and economic activity are recorded, the reform overwhelmingly favours Lagos and a handful of commercially dominant states in the South-West. Lagos’s outsized contribution to VAT revenue is frequently cited to justify this shift. The logic is straightforward: where revenue is generated, revenue should remain. But Nigeria’s history warns that straightforward logic often produces dangerous outcomes. In the First Republic, a strong derivation principle allowed regions to retain up to 50 percent of revenues from cocoa, groundnuts, and palm produce. That system collapsed not because derivation was inefficient, but because widening regional disparities turned it into a political weapon. The fiscal tensions it generated contributed to the instability that ended civilian rule. After the civil war, military governments centralized revenue sharing not out of ideological preference, but because national survival required redistribution. Oil revenues were pooled to hold a fractured country together, not to reward efficiency. The VAT debate now retraces that path, without the trauma that once forced compromise. Many Northern states, heavily dependent on VAT allocations to fund basic services, see the reform not as fiscal federalism but as fiscal punishment. Their argument is blunt: productivity cannot be rewarded fairly in a country where productivity itself has been shaped by decades of uneven federal investment, insecurity, and policy bias. When ports, rail lines, industrial clusters, and financial infrastructure are concentrated in one region, derivation ceases to be neutral, it becomes structural exclusion. The echoes of the Niger Delta struggle are unmistakable. For decades, oil-producing communities watched wealth flow to Abuja while bearing the environmental and social costs of extraction. Today, roles appear reversed: commercially dominant states demand to keep what they generate, while poorer regions warn that redistribution, the glue of the federation, is being quietly dismantled. The federal government’s response, that states should simply “grow their economies,” rings hollow in regions battling insurgency, banditry, collapsing education systems, and mass poverty. Growth is not summoned by rhetoric; it is enabled by security, infrastructure, and human capital, public goods that require funding in the first place. History is unambiguous: Nigeria’s most destabilizing crises often begin as revenue disputes disguised as technical reforms. When groups feel fiscally cornered, resistance follows, political, legal, and sometimes worse. Wether anyone agrees or not, a VAT regime that sharpens inequality without robust equalization mechanisms is not reform, it is deferred instability. The question therefore becomes, wether Nigeria is prepared for another combustive civil disorder? The Lagos Model Goes National The reforms unmistakably bear the imprint of the Lagos model that is notorious for its centralized authority, digital surveillance, and uncompromising enforcement. In Lagos, this model thrived on a dense commercial base and a large formal sector. Nationally, it risks flattening Nigeria’s economic diversity into a one-size-fits-all template. Equally corrosive is the perception, fair or not, that fiscal power is increasingly concentrated within a narrow

Analysts Express Concerns Over Timing Of Lifting Forex Ban on 43 Items

The recent decision by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to lift the foreign exchange restriction on 43 items is seen as a move that could potentially boost market confidence. However, analysts argue that the timing of this decision is challenging, given the current global economic context, where capital flows are unfavorable for emerging economies. According to analysts at Afrinvest, the policy has good intentions as it aims to cautiously restore market confidence, which has been undermined by liquidity issues and previous unconventional policies. Nevertheless, the analysts highlight the unfavorable timing, as developed markets are experiencing moderating inflation, which supports improved real rates of return, while emerging markets face forex volatility, high inflation, and political uncertainty, which compound investment risks. Afrinvest recommends that the CBN should implement complementary policies to attract the necessary forex to achieve its objectives. They suggest seeking concessionary loans from bilateral and multilateral institutions to bolster foreign reserves. They also advise exploring oil-for-loan agreements to unlock liquidity, along with stronger efforts to combat oil theft and enhance oil production. The analysts cite data from the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, which reveals a 14.0% month-on-month increase in the nation’s oil output to an average of 1.35 million barrels per day (excluding condensates) in September 2023. This marks the highest level since January 2022, and they attribute the improvement to the government’s commitment to curbing oil theft and bolstering fiscal capacity. Afrinvest emphasizes that the success of the CBN’s decision to reverse the forex ban on 43 items hinges on its ability to provide sufficient liquidity to meet the demand at the official window. They predict that, with adequate liquidity, the parallel market premium will gradually decline, but insufficient liquidity could lead to increased pressure in both the official and parallel markets. The analysts advocate a long-term approach to addressing Nigeria’s forex challenges, including containing oil theft, boosting non-oil exports, and encouraging cross-border investment in technology and service-based sectors. The CBN recently reaffirmed its commitment to enhancing foreign exchange liquidity and shared a 6-point plan to address forex challenges, including the lifting of the forex ban on 43 items. They also pledged to make regular market interventions and clear the current forex backlog. In 2015, the CBN, under the leadership of Godwin Emefiele, had imposed a forex ban on 43 items in an attempt to manage forex and promote import substitution. However, this policy failed to achieve its objectives due to misalignment with market forces and a lack of coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities, resulting in declining forex reserves and a weakening Naira. The decision to lift the forex ban is seen as a positive step to reduce pressure on the parallel market and curb speculative activities, potentially narrowing the gap between official and parallel market rates.