A society does not unravel only when guns drown out laws. It also weakens when citizens begin to suspect that the text meant to govern them can be quietly adjusted after the ceremony has ended. Once a law loses credibility, enforcement becomes a contest of power rather than a discipline of legitimacy. Compliance turns into a gamble, not a civic duty. That is the unsettling shadow now hanging over Nigeria’s 2025 tax reform project—an agenda promoted as economic renewal but increasingly threatened by a credibility crisis that strikes at the heart of constitutional order.
On the surface, the ambition behind the reforms is hard to quarrel with. The Tinubu administration presented the package as a modernisation effort: broaden the tax base, reduce distortions, simplify the regime, and build a framework that supports growth while protecting the poor. Government spokesmen insist most workers and small businesses will benefit, and that the reforms will help stabilise revenues without strangling enterprise. But in a democracy, policy intent is not enough. Process is part of the product. The integrity of lawmaking is not a procedural nicety; it is the foundation that makes difficult policies tolerable because people can trust that what is being enforced is what was debated, voted on, and assented to.
From inception, the reform effort drew scepticism—some ideological, some political, and some grounded in anxieties about timing and implementation. That scepticism has now hardened into something more dangerous: the allegation that the law Nigerians are being asked to obey is not the law their representatives passed.
The controversy burst into the open from within the legislature itself. On December 17, 2025, Abdussamad Dasuki, a member of the House of Representatives, raised a matter of privilege, alleging that the gazetted tax laws available to the public differed materially from the versions debated, harmonised, and approved by the National Assembly. This is not the usual theatre of partisan opposition. It is an institutional alarm bell: “I voted for one text; the country is now being governed by another.”
In the days that followed, the matter refused to die the way uncomfortable stories often die in Nigeria—under the weight of silence and the fatigue of citizens. The House constituted a committee to investigate the alleged discrepancies. Then came the most revealing development: on December 26, 2025, the National Assembly leadership directed that the tax laws be re-gazetted and that Certified True Copies (CTCs) of the versions duly passed by both chambers be issued. Re-gazetting is not administrative housekeeping you do when nothing is wrong. It is what you do when authenticity is in dispute, when the state itself is no longer confident that the public record reflects the legislative record.
At the centre of this crisis is a deceptively simple question: which document is the law? In principle, gazetting exists to publish and preserve what was enacted. It is meant to be the public mirror of legislative intent, not a creative rewrite. If the mirror is distorted—whether by error, negligence, interference, or sabotage—the country does not merely face confusion; it faces the possibility of being governed by illegality dressed in official clothing.
This is why the distinction between a clerical error and a material alteration matters. Every legislative system has typos—misnumbered sections, wrong cross-references, and punctuation slips. Such defects can be corrected without shaking the constitutional order. But if the alleged differences touch substance—expanding enforcement powers, shifting oversight, changing compliance thresholds, altering appeal conditions—then the issue stops being editorial and becomes constitutional. And what has circulated in public debate is not the stuff of commas. It is the stuff of power: whether tax authorities can reach deeper into private life with fewer guardrails; whether due process is narrowed; whether oversight by elected representatives is diluted in the final text.
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The executive has responded with two broad notes: urgency and reassurance. The reform team insists that the commencement date—January 1, 2026—is crucial, warning that delay carries costs. Officials urge Nigerians to await the legislature’s findings, arguing that proper comparison requires the certified harmonised version transmitted for assent—access which, they imply, is not widely available. Government communicators have also suggested that some resistance is fuelled by misinformation and that sabotage efforts may be at play.
But urgency cannot cure illegitimacy. In fact, urgency is often the excuse illegitimacy uses to walk in through the front door without being searched. Even if the reforms are economically sound—and Nigerians can debate that—no reform survives the collapse of the process. A tax system runs on trust more than coercion. Where citizens suspect rules can be changed after the vote, compliance becomes cynical: people comply only when forced, evade when they can, and interpret taxation as extraction rather than contribution. Investors, too, price uncertainty. They can tolerate hard taxes; they do not tolerate unstable law.
That is why professional and legal concerns matter. If divergences are proven, uncertainty will spill into compliance planning, contract assumptions, investment risk models, and litigation strategy. Courts may end up freezing disputed portions, stripping them out, or—if process defects are found to be fatal—casting a longer shadow over the law’s enforceability. A country cannot build a stable fiscal future on statutes whose authenticity is contested in public.
The way out is not drama; it is documentary clarity. Nigerians need a visible chain of custody: the harmonised bill as passed, the enrolled bill transmitted for assent, the text signed, and the text gazetted—placed side-by-side, clause-by-clause, with differences marked and explained. CTCs are not a courtesy; they are a constitutional necessity. When citizens must comply under penalty, they deserve certainty. Courts and businesses require it too.
If disputed provisions exist, the rational interim posture is to ring-fence contested clauses pending verification—proceed with what is clean, and quarantine what is questionable. That does not sabotage reform; it protects reform from judicial ambush.
Finally, Nigeria must treat this episode as a governance warning, not a public-relations inconvenience. In an age when a single altered paragraph can shift billions and rewire citizens’ rights, we need modern legislative integrity architecture: secure version control, audit trails from committee harmonisation through assent to gazetting, publicly accessible repositories, and strict consequences for tampering. If our banks can secure transactions with layered verification, the Republic can secure its laws with equal seriousness.
Dakuku Peterside is the author of two bestselling books, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface.
