RNR EDITORIAL
The Federal Government’s announcement that it collected ₦360.29 billion from the Electronic Money Transfer Levy (EMTL) between January and October 2025 should be welcome news. It signals a country embracing digital payments, expanding its tax net, and reducing reliance on oil revenues.
But for millions of Nigerians, the numbers ring hollow.
At a time when citizens endure punishing inflation, epileptic electricity, dilapidated roads, failing schools, and overstretched hospitals, the question is simple: Where is the impact of all this revenue?
Nigerians are not blind to the irony. Every electronic transfer above ₦10,000 attracts the ₦50 levy. Yet the same citizens who fund this revenue struggle to charge their phones because the power grid collapses at will. They navigate cratered roads to go to work. Businesses shut down because diesel prices remain unbearable.
Public frustration is therefore justified.
When young Nigerians on social media say the country is rich enough to fix its problems, they are not complaining — they are speaking a fundamental truth. Another citizen’s lament captures the national mood even more sharply:
“What are these monies used for? How do we benefit? There is no light, no good roads. Everything goes into embezzlement.”
The government owes the people transparency, not platitudes. Detailed public accounting of EMTL proceeds should be mandatory. Real investments in education, power, infrastructure, and job-creation should be visible — not shared behind closed doors, buried in bureaucracy, or announced as policies that never leave the pages of a budget document.
More importantly, government must recognise that taxation without delivery widens the trust deficit. Nigerians cannot be taxed into poverty and then lectured into patience.
If digital revenues are truly rising, then service delivery should rise with them.
If EMTL collections have jumped to historic levels, then public confidence should not be falling.
And if government expects citizens to keep paying, then it must show — clearly and consistently — that it is using their money to build, not to waste.
A nation cannot tax its way into development.
It must invest its way there. And Nigerians are waiting — not for promises, but for proof.