This strange tax on CSWs

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

Oga Taiwo Oyedele, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, this explanation that you made of the new tax laws, are you sure you have not released a fox in the chicken coop, let loose a bull in a china shop or even let loose a convicted rapist in a convent? You said in a video posted on X on Monday last week that income earned by commercial sex workers will be taxed by the federal government under your new tax reforms. Citing what you called examples of taxable income, you said the new laws do not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources of income, but only focus on whether money was earned from goods or services.

You said, “There is this extreme example… If somebody is doing runs, they go and look for men to sleep with. You know that is a service; they will pay tax on it. One thing about the tax law, it does not separate between whether what you are doing is legitimate or not; it doesn’t even ask you. It just asks you whether you have an income. Did you get it from rendering a service or providing a good? Then, you pay tax.” He however said sending money to your parents is a non-exchange transaction, which is not taxable.

I see many technical problems with Oga Oyedele’s drive to tax income from [what United Nations agencies delicately call] commercial sex workers, CSWs for short. To begin with, do they keep proper records of their business transactions, including the number of customers per month, quality of service rendered to the customers, and the fees paid for the service? For tax purposes, I am sure you will like to see receipts, vouchers, POS or account transfers, bank statements and annual balance sheets.  You may even demand to see audited accounts, maybe by Pannell Kerr Forster. From this type of business?

The late Director General of National Directorate of Employment [NDE], Malam Abubakar Mohammed, once said one of the things responsible for the early death of many small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria is the lack of elementary book keeping. Too many small businessmen cannot separate personal from business expenses; I know a shopkeeper in my hometown who puts all the money from his trading in the same box from where he also pays for anything that his wives ask for. Malam Abubakar said no one qualifies to get an NDE loan until he attends a course in elementary book keeping.

My question now is, did any CSWs turn up at NDE for training? If so, I would like to see the Syllabus and Course Content. I will also like to have a word with the instructors, because the chances of misconduct are real in these classes. The danger is real that tutors could be turned into customers through adept seduction. Even in our tertiary and secondary schools, there are many cases of seduction of teachers and lecturers in order for students to get higher marks. How about this NDE program that is dealing with students who are professional seducers? They even have greater motivation. While normal students are looking for certificates or diplomas that may or not bring income, CSWs in NDE courses are looking for soft loans to start a business. Any skill or talent that they deploy towards this end must count as a wise business investment.

Oga Oyedele, this tax that you are going to collect from CSWs, where is the template? I know that with respect to civil servants and workers in the Organised Private Sector, there is a template for deducting Pay As You Earn [PAYE] taxes. It even has provision for exemptions if the person has a certain number of dependents. Do you have a similar template for CSWs? The problem is, income from this business is totally deregulated. Well before you guys deregulated petrol prices, this ancient trade had been completely deregulated for centuries. Or did you ever see it feature on the template of the old Price Control Board? The Stock Market that posts the daily movement of shares, did it ever capture the movement of prices in this special market? It is more deregulated than diesel, offerings at places of worship or even beggars’ alms.

The going rates for Short Time [as practitioners of the trade call it] varies from city to city. The attractiveness of the sex worker; the customer’s bargaining ability; the desperation of the sex worker occasioned by pressure from landlords, family members and policemen; inclement weather [such as, if it is raining or the night is cold] as well as the level of competition in the street all affect prices. It also matters whether the customer is a visitor to the city who is “stranded.” The rate for a whole night’s service is obviously higher than for short time.

CSWs do not carry around a POS machine. They will probably not accept a bank transfer, because Yahoo Yahoo boys have a way of sending a fake credit alert. So, payment has to be in cash, which even EFCC’s Eagle Claw software cannot detect. EFCC will wait in vain for the money to be laundered into a bank account, because the worker will go straight to the market to shop for food, cloth and cosmetics. The money that she will send home for parental support will not go through a bank, but through a home folk going through the motor park. Even the customer who paid the money, will he declare it in the statement of expenses to his office? One bank official who was retiring his touring advance to the auditor added an innocuous expense item, “Man no be wood.”

A puzzling aspect of Oyedele’s explanation is that income from a good or a service will be taxed whether or not the transaction is legal. This is a moral hot potato. Taxing a service is morally tantamount to legitimising it. If a person pays tax on something, which moral right does the state have again to come back later and say what he did was illegal? Why is government not taxing kidnappers and bandits? Nigeria Bureau of Statistics estimated that kidnappers collected N2.2 trillion in ransom from Nigerian families between May 2023 and April 2024. Has Bureau of Statistics published figures of CSWs’ takings within the same period? Just one kidnap victim may pay tens of millions of naira as ransom; all the CSWs in Abuja combined may not make in a month what a kidnap kingpin could make in one incident. So, if it is money that government really wants, why not tax kidnappers, bandits, pirates, secessionists, oil bunkerers, burglars, touts, political thugs, praise singers and even roadside beggars instead of hapless, peace-loving CSWs?

Only that, Nigeria is not the first country to tax income from illegal trades. There was a story I read in the newspapers three decades ago, about an Israeli man who was charged to court for tax evasion. The Tax Office discovered that he had a certain income which he did not declare in his tax returns. When he was hauled before a magistrate, he pleaded that he did not declare that income because he was a house burglar and he got the money by burgling some houses. The magistrate [a true Jew, if you ask me], however said, “No, you must pay tax even if you stole the money. You cannot cheat the society twice; you steal the money and you refuse to pay tax on it?!”

The burglar however made what sounded like a good argument. He said, “If I mention on my tax forms that I got the money from house burglary, the Tax Office will turn the information over to the police and I will be prosecuted.” The magistrate however countered. He said, “No! Tax returns are confidential. Tax Office is not supposed to disclose anyone’s tax returns to unauthorized persons. Tax Commissioner cannot turn over your tax returns to the police. The information you provided to him is confidential. It is illegal to breach official confidentiality.” So off the burglar went to prison, not for burglary, but for tax evasion!

I imagine that a CSW is brought before a Nigerian magistrate for tax evasion [I have one particular magistrate in mind]. He will say, “You seduced men and made them to desert their wives; you made them to tell lies at home and at work; they said they travelled to see their sick parent when in fact they were hiding with you in a hotel; you distracted public officials from their essential services to the public; you robbed poor students of the pocket money that parents sent to them; you helped to spread gonorrhea and other diseases in the society; you spread immorality in the society; you made parents, teachers and clerics to make fools of themselves by preaching against immorality; and yet you didn’t pay tax on the income. You must go to Kuje Prison with hard labour and with no possibility of parole!”