Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed says the Federal Government has concluded plans to increase revenue by introducing new taxes.

The announcement came barely a week after the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udo Udoma and chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Babatunde Fowler announced that the government was planning to increase the Value Added Tax (VAT) to fund minimum wage.

The tripartite meeting set up by the government had some months ago increased the national minimum wage from ₦18,000 to ₦30,000. The new minimum wage has been passed by the National Assembly and accented to by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Speaking at the public hearing on the 2019 budget organized by the Senate and House of Representatives committees on appropriation, Ahmed said the government has devised a new revenue initiative to increase revenue needed to fund the 2019 budget.

While appealing for support from the lawmakers, the minister disclosed that the initiative has been segregated into three thematic areas.

“The first area is sustainability in revenue generation. The focus of this is for us to build a sustainable revenue generation ecosystem by ensuring resilience and applying revenue streams, applying the right incentives, the right safeguards as well as ensuring accountability and performance management systems,” she said.

“For this focus, the government seeks to improve collection, block loopholes and collaborate with trading partners to manage performance, deregulate and provide funding for the energy sector.

“The second thematic area is to identify new and enhance the enforcement of existing revenue streams. We plan to grow revenue by collecting new taxes, modulling the tax base and enabling strategic investment that will spur economic growth.

“In this area, we have identified some new taxes that we’ll be coming to discuss with the National Assembly. We’ve also continuously been working to broaden the tax base to expand and improve the value added tax performance.

“We will be working with the National Assembly to amend some laws and we might be using some executive orders,” she explained.

Mrs. Ahmed said the third thematic area is achieving cohesion in the revenue ecosystem. She noted that the federal government is making efforts to ensure that the performance of the 2019 budget exceeds that of 2018.

Although she did not reveal the details of the new taxes, some other government officials have suggested new taxes on luxury goods like alcoholic beverages as well as increase in VAT.