There is something that is eating at our money faster than inflation today. While people are complaining about the rising cost of living, the tax law on cash transactions is adding insult to the injury by draining out our money beyond expectations. This new levy on cash transfer is hitting hard on the ordinary Nigerians wallets as if we are doing daily contribution to a communal fund without our knowledge.
For every N10,000 transfer you make you lose N50 to tax. The N50 may seems small but for people like us who transfer money multiple times a day it's something to bother about. I personally do all my payments by transfer because of my business, and that's taxes eating away at my daily earnings everyday.
Imagine making transfers more than 15 times in a day, that's N750 lost to tax, multiply that by 30 days and you are looking at N22,500 gone in a month on taxes just from mobile transfer alone. This is money that could have been reinvested into my business, but vanished into government coffers without any tangible benefits to me.
The government justifies this tax as a means to increase revenue and formalize the economy, but the burden falls heavily on small business owners and low-income earners. The government hooked the citizens on this without a way of escaping it. Formally, the N50 deduction was taken from the receiver of the money not the sender, and people were able to outsmart the system. Since the deduction was for N10,000 and above, people would send N9,99 to avoid the tax, but now the government has closed this loophole by making the tax apply to the sender instead of the receiver. With this, there's no way you can escape it anymore unless you withdraw cash and pay physically which may even cost you more money.
What they did to make sure no one is that instead of the N50 been deducted from the transferred amount as it used to be, they now deduct it from your account balance making it impossible to avoid paying the tax. This means that even if you are transferring money to yourself or between your own accounts, you still have to pay the tax. The government doesn't care if you are sending money to your own accounts.
I feel really annoyed by this tax because everything I do with money involves a transfer and I am constantly losing money that could have been used for other things. The worse part is that there's no evidence of any benefits this tax has brought to ordinary Nigerians. The government is looking for more smart ways to collect taxes from an already struggling population without providing improved services or infrastructure. There's no electricity, no good roads, no good health care system, no clean water supply, yet they keep taking more taxes from the people.
Well, what can we do but to accept it. It's the reality we have to face under the current government administration. We hope that a chance of government will bring better policies that will benefit the ordinary poor Nigerians instead of taking more from them.