Ayodele Subair: The Chairman Who Let the Numbers Speak

Some people fill a room with noise. Ayodele Subair built his legacy in near silence.

On November 18, at the Lagos Oriental Hotel, the Executive Chairman of the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service was named Board Chair of the Year at the 2025 Peak Performer Awards. The magazine also placed him on its cover.

LIRS itself received the Peak Performing Revenue Agency of the Year. Applause followed. The country watched a tax office earn ovation. It hinted at a shift: governance had entered the awards season.

Subair’s record reads like a revenue sprint. When he took office in 2016, the agency generated about N240 billion. It has since risen to N427 billion, with an ambitious target of N1.4 trillion set for 2025. Taxes stopped being a mystery; they began showing up as systems.

The key to this shift was software and order. The eTax platform launched in 2019 and allowed taxpayers to use self-service tools. Hotels and restaurants met the Eco Fiscal System, an automated way of collecting consumption taxes. Staff welfare was upgraded. An intelligence unit was built to study taxpayers more precisely.

Colleagues say he rarely seeks the camera. He prefers clean data to loud speeches. His degrees from Manchester and the University of Lagos gave him the theory. PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG gave him the habits. ICAN and CITN gave him the discipline.

That mix shaped his public mission: to show that taxation can feel like participation in government. In his acceptance remarks, Subair credited the LIRS team and spoke of innovation and service delivery. Even gratitude sounded like a strategic plan.

Other professionals received awards across law, technology, finance, and oil. The hall felt like a map of sectors that keep the country upright.

A chairmanship once viewed as administrative now looks like public architecture. Subair may be quiet, yet his spreadsheets have been talking for years.