- Says none of 36 state governors made input to the bills except Gov Sannwo-Olu of Lagos State and the Chairman of the Reform Committee, Taiwo Oyedele;
- Both gentlemen drafted the Reform Bills;
- Bills deliberately designed to favour Lagos and Ogun states;
- Some members of the Committee have disowned the Bills.
Engr. Galadima, an Elder statesman and stalwart of the NNPP says the Bills, in their present format have to be rejected because the process leading to its formulation lacks transparency.
He said the bill is a contraption of Mr. Taiwo Oyedele, the Chairman of the tax reform committee and Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the Lagos State Governor, contending, the two of them practically wrote the bills before handing them over to President Tinubu.
Engr. Galadima said that in fact, all members of the committee from other parts of the country have already disowned the bills because they discovered that the final bill did not reflect the contributions submitted by the various sub-committees.
READ ALSO: TCN Announces 14 Days’ Power Outage in Parts of FCT, Nasarawa State
Engr. Galadima who spoke as a guest of This Day Live, a programme on Arise TV. chided Dr. Reuben Abati whom he accused of deploying divisive narratives that had the tendency to pit regions of the country against each other.
Galadima also stressed that the bills will never be allowed to scale through in their present format because of the approach of President Tinubu and his recent statement of ‘no going back.”
He also accused the committee and President Tinubu of over reaching themselves by veering into the subject of derivation or revenue sharing, which is a constitutional issue.
Contributing to the subject, Professor David Aworawo of the University of Lagos disagreed with the committee on several aspects of the Bill.
READ ALSO: Trump to be Sentenced Before Inauguration
He referred to a provision in the Bill which stated that by 2030 funding to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) shall cease and be diverted to the National Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), saying that provision alone goes to show that the committee lacked adequate knowledge of contemporary Nigeria.
Contending, Prof Aworawo explained that most modern physical structures in tertiary institutions in Nigeria are funded by TETFUND, asking, “If you phase out TETFUND and utilise the money as loans to students, where will they stay to receive the lectures?”
Reacting to the position of Mr. Galadima, Taiwo Oyedele confirmed that members of the committee only met with the Governor of Lagos, who ended being the only governor that made input to the bills.
He said even though the committee met with Mr. Uba Sani, the Governor of Kaduna state, they did not succeed in discussing the subject matter of the tax reform bills.
He said that the committee did not succeed in having any engagement with the remaining 35 state governors.
Mr. Oyedele said that at inception, the committee had planned to meet with a governor from each of the six geo-political zones of the country but succeeded in meeting with the Lagos state governor alone.
