Forged laws, fickle numbers, and Nigeria’s quiet constitutional crisis
John Onyeukwu
Forged laws, fickle numbers, and Nigeria’s quiet constitutional crisis
As Nigeria pushes aggressive tax and revenue reforms, recent controversies expose the hidden cost of sidelining constitutional process, judicial safeguards, and transparent fiscal communication - costs that markets, institutions, and citizens ultimately pay.
By John Onyeukwu
Published in the Policy & Reform Column of Business a.m. newspaper, on Monday December 29, 2025. Pull out attached.
Nigeria is not merely facing a fiscal challenge; it is confronting a constitutional test. The allegations surrounding the alteration of the 2025 Tax Reform Laws, combined with sharply contradictory official accounts of government revenue performance, point to a deeper and more troubling reality: the gradual erosion of constitutional discipline, institutional integrity, and public trust under the current reform moment.
At stake is not simply whether policies succeed or fail. What is now in question is whether the Nigerian state, under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, still governs itself according to law, truth, and accountable process, or whether expediency has quietly displaced constitutional order in the name of urgency.
The controversy surrounding Nigeria’s 2025 tax reform laws is unprecedented in its implications. Following months of legislative work, public hearings, and harmonisation between the Senate and the House of Representatives, four major tax statutes were passed and assented to by President Tinubu in June 2025. What should have followed was routine and constitutionally straightforward: the gazetting of the laws in exactly the form approved by the National Assembly.
Instead, allegations emerged in December 2025 that the versions gazetted and circulated by relevant executive agencies contained provisions never passed by lawmakers. These reportedly included clauses expanding enforcement powers, introducing quasi-criminal sanctions, and weakening long-established judicial safeguards for taxpayers.
This is not a drafting oversight. If established, it constitutes a constitutional violation.
Section 58 of the 1999 Constitution is unequivocal: a bill becomes law only in the precise form passed by the National Assembly and assented to by the President. Any post-assent alteration, however well-intentioned, amounts to executive legislation, a power the Constitution does not confer.
Nigerian courts have repeatedly upheld this principle. In Attorney-General of Abia State v. Attorney-General of the Federation (2002), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that legislative authority belongs exclusively to the legislature and cannot be exercised indirectly by the executive. In A.G. Federation v. Atiku Abubakar (2007), the Court further emphasised that constitutional procedures are substantive safeguards, not technicalities to be waived for convenience.
If judicially challenged, the courts would almost certainly demand certified true copies of the bills passed by both chambers and compare them with the gazetted versions. Any material deviation would render the affected provisions void, not because the policy objective is wrong, but because the process is unlawful. This distinction matters. The rule of law does not judge intentions; it judges authority.
The decision by the leadership of the National Assembly in late December 2025, under Senate President Godswill Akpabio, to order a re-gazetting of the tax laws implicitly acknowledges that a serious procedural problem exists. Yet re-gazetting alone does not extinguish the constitutional question already triggered. It corrects the text prospectively, but it does not explain which version governed enforcement in the intervening period, whether administrative actions were taken under disputed provisions, or how an enacted law acquired clauses Parliament never approved.
In constitutional terms, process violations are not cured by correction; they are addressed by accountability. Without a transparent institutional explanation, whether from the Federal Ministry of Justice, the Federal Inland Revenue Service, or the National Assembly bureaucracy, re-gazetting risks appearing as administrative damage control rather than genuine constitutional compliance.
Defenders of aggressive reform often argue that Nigeria’s fiscal crisis demands speed, decisiveness, and administrative flexibility. But constitutional democracies exist precisely to restrain such impulses. Power that escapes process today rarely returns voluntarily tomorrow. As the Supreme Court warned in Military Governor of Lagos State v. Ojukwu (1986), government itself must be subject to the law, even in moments of perceived necessity.
Taxation lies at the heart of the social contract. When enforcement powers expand without legislative consent, the balance between citizen and state tilts dangerously toward coercion. Advanced democracies treat legislative integrity as sacrosanct for this reason. In the United States, discrepancies between an enrolled bill passed by Congress and the version signed by the President can trigger invalidation under the Presentment Clause. In India, courts routinely strike down executive actions that distort legislative intent, even where policy goals are otherwise legitimate.
Nigeria cannot afford to normalise a lower constitutional standard simply because its institutions are under strain.
Parallel to the tax law controversy is another, equally corrosive development: conflicting official narratives regarding Nigeria’s 2025 revenue performance. Earlier in the year, senior government officials projected confidence, suggesting that revenue targets, particularly from non-oil sources such as VAT, customs collections, and company income tax, were being met or even exceeded. These assurances were repeatedly amplified in public briefings and policy forums, reinforcing a broader political narrative of economic turnaround, improved compliance, and reform success under the current administration.
By December, however, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, informed the National Assembly that actual revenues would fall short of projections by an estimated ₦30 trillion, an extraordinary deviation by any fiscal standard. This disclosure was not accompanied by a detailed public reconciliation explaining the gap between earlier optimism and revised realities, nor by a breakdown clarifying whether the shortfall stemmed from overestimated growth, weak enforcement, macroeconomic shocks, or structural leakages.
This is more than a forecasting error. Revenue projections anchor borrowing plans, debt sustainability assessments, and statutory allocations to states and local governments under Nigeria’s federal framework. When figures shift dramatically without transparent explanation, markets price in uncertainty, investors retreat, and sovereign risk premiums rise. Legislators, deprived of consistent and reliable data, are unable to exercise effective oversight, while subnational governments are left to absorb the fiscal shock through emergency budget cuts, delayed payments, and abandoned development commitments.
The Supreme Court has been clear on this point. In Centre for Oil Pollution Watch v. NNPC (2019), it emphasised that transparency in public finance is a constitutional obligation owed to the Nigerian people, not a discretionary courtesy extended at the convenience of the executive. The Court underscored that public institutions managing national resources operate in trust for citizens and must therefore be open, accurate, and accountable in their financial representations. Similarly, in SERAP v. Federal Republic of Nigeria before the ECOWAS Court of Justice, Nigeria was held internationally accountable for failing to provide accurate and transparent information on public revenues and expenditures. While not binding in the strict domestic sense, ECOWAS jurisprudence has become increasingly persuasive in Nigerian governance debates, reinforcing a regional consensus that opacity in fiscal matters constitutes a rights violation, not merely an administrative lapse.
Taken together, questionable lawmaking and inconsistent fiscal communication produce institutional fragility. Investors assess not only tax rates or incentives, but predictability, coherence, and respect for process. Citizens comply not merely out of obligation or fear of sanction, but when they perceive fairness, legality, and honesty in state conduct. Subnational governments, already fiscally stretched, bear the real-world cost of late-year revenue collapses through unpaid salaries, abandoned capital projects, and weakened service delivery.
This is how states lose credibility: not through a single dramatic rupture, but through repeated small departures from discipline that gradually accumulate into systemic distrust.
At its core, this episode poses a fundamental question about the Nigerian state: does power flow from law, or does law quietly adjust itself to power? The Constitution was deliberately designed to prevent such ambiguity. It ensures that reform is negotiated, not imposed; that efficiency is balanced by restraint; and that truth anchors policy rather than trails it. When these principles weaken, reform drifts toward coercion, numbers become narrative instruments rather than shared facts, and governance slips from constitutional order into political performance.
Nigeria’s tax reform agenda may well be necessary, even urgent. Its fiscal ambitions may be justified by demographic pressure, debt obligations, and developmental need. But necessity does not excuse constitutional shortcuts, and ambition does not license narrative inconsistency. Re-gazetting corrects the text, not the process. Without a transparent accounting for how the law was altered, who authorised the alteration, and how fiscal figures were publicly misrepresented, Nigeria risks signalling that constitutional breach can be administratively tidied up, even if institutional trust is left unrepaired.
The choice before Nigeria is therefore not between reform and stagnation. It is between reform anchored in constitutional order and reform pursued at its expense. The former builds legitimacy, invites voluntary compliance, and creates institutions that outlive political administrations. The latter may deliver short-term revenue or political optics, but it corrodes trust, weakens oversight, and normalises procedural shortcuts that are difficult to reverse. History, Nigerian and comparative, offers a consistent lesson: reforms that disregard process rarely endure, and gains achieved without legitimacy are often reclaimed by instability. Sustainable progress rests not on the speed of change, but on the credibility of the system that delivers it.
Follow Accountable Futures (with John Onyeukwu) WhatsApp Channel https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029Va6de2U7oQhkR1uYDA1S
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail, and delete or destroy the message. Thank you.