What Have You Done For Me Lately, Mr Taxman?

…Lucky Dube, Nigerian Capitalism and the Taxation of the Poor

By Jenifatu Yakubu

The first time I heard Lucky Dube’s Taxman, I was at the office, at the beginning of the year, right when Nigeria’s new tax regime had landed and the whole country was arguing over it.

The economy was harsh, businesses were folding, people were struggling simply to survive, and into that reality the government introduced a new tax law, smoothing over the controversy, insisting it would not matter, until it became operational and every Nigerian noticed that this law taxed the poor too.

Listening to Dube’s lyrics, something in me went still. This is the Nigerian situation. Lucky Dube never set foot in this country, and yet he became the prophet who captured the true state of our economy and the tax law we are still demanding answers about.

This is an essay about tax. But it is also about what happens when a government mistakes revenue collection for governance, when the machinery of the state exists not to serve the people funding it but to extract from them efficiently while delivering nothing, when democracy becomes the costume a dictatorship wears to international summits while its citizens scramble for cups of rice thrown from campaign buses like crumbs tossed to animals for entertainment.

This is about Nigeria. And if you are Nigerian, none of this will surprise you. What it might do, if we sit with it long enough, is force us to name what we have been circling around for decades without saying directly: that the impoverishment of Nigerian citizens is not an accident of bad governance. It is a strategy.

Lucky Dube asks the question every Nigerian has swallowed at a checkpoint, at a hospital gate, at a school that produces certificates instead of thinkers, at a road that has not been fixed since the last election promise: what have you done for me lately, Mr Taxman?

We pay tax and you take it. We comply and you demand more. We protest and you send soldiers. We ask and you call it treason. What have you done to alleviate poverty, to boost an economy where the naira haemorrhages value while government officials build houses abroad?

What have you done to reduce unemployment in a country where graduates roam the streets with degrees and no destination?

What have you done to resuscitate a power sector so comatose that Nigerians have normalised darkness, buying generators with money they should be saving, paying twice for electricity, once to the government and once to their own survival instincts?

What have you done for the hospitals where doctors beg for gloves, where patients die not from illness but from the criminal absence of basic equipment? What have you done for the roads that kill more Nigerians than any declared enemy?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the constitutional demands of a citizenry that has been paying for services it has never received, and the silence that answers them is the loudest indictment in Nigerian public life.

And then the numbers arrive, and the numbers are where rage becomes something colder and more precise. The World Bank poverty line, when three dollars a day is converted into naira and calculated across a year, comes to approximately ₦1,495,080, meaning a Nigerian needs at minimum that amount annually simply to survive above extreme poverty. Nigeria’s lowest tax threshold is ₦800,000 yearly. Read that again slowly.

The government begins taxing Nigerians at an income level that falls nearly ₦700,000 short of what the World Bank defines as the bare minimum for survival. I did not have to infer this. I asked the question directly, at a training on the new tax laws for lawyers, to a man who works with the committee that reports to the president.

I told him that under World Bank poverty statistics, anyone living below three dollars a day converts to roughly one point four million naira a year, which is below the poverty line, and that Nigeria’s tax threshold begins at eight hundred thousand, meaning everyone between eight hundred thousand and one point four million is being taxed while living below poverty.

His answer was that if they did not tax that bracket, most Nigerians would not be taxable at all, and the government would be unable to raise revenue. I sat with that answer and asked what I am asking now.

Whose fault is it that so many Nigerians fall below that line in the first place? Whose fault is the harsh economy that keeps businesses from flourishing and people from rising above it?

Whose fault is the inflation eating every naira before it reaches a pocket? Whose fault is the insecurity and the violence that walks and talks like terrorism even when the government refuses to call it by its name?

You cannot manufacture the poverty and then tax the poverty and call it revenue policy. And if you need proof that this is strategy rather than incompetence, look no further than the fuel subsidy removal announced on inauguration day in 2023, without a transition plan, without cushioning for the poor, which immediately doubled transportation costs for the Nigerians least able to absorb them while the savings disappeared into government accounts without transparent redistribution.

The timing was not accidental. The absence of protection for the poor was not an oversight. It was a choice, made in full knowledge of who would suffer most, and made anyway. Lucky Dube sang that the taxman takes from the rich, takes from the poor, takes even from him, and he could not understand it. We understand it now. It is not confusion. It is intention.

Government officials who swore an oath to serve Nigeria have turned government into a money-making machinery where they collect salaries among the highest in the world while presiding over one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on earth.

The cognitive dissonance required to hold those two facts together without combusting is the daily labour of every conscious Nigerian. Billions of naira in taxpayers’ money disappear unaccounted for every year, with no transparency, no prosecution, no consequences, and no answers delivered to the Nigerians who funded every missing naira.

Nigerians pay for a police force that asks crime victims for money before agreeing to investigate. I know this not from statistics but from standing in a police station after reporting a sexual assault, a theft, a fraud, and being told with the full confidence of a man who knows he will never be held accountable that nothing moves without payment.

That was the day I understood that justice in Nigeria is not blind. It has eyes, and they are trained on your wallet. It was also the day I questioned everything that had driven me to study law, the naive and stubborn belief that the system could be made to work for the people it was built to crush. Justice in Nigeria belongs to the highest bidder. That is not cynicism. That is the operating manual.

The oppression does not announce itself as oppression. It arrives layered, cascading, each tier pressing down on the one below it. Government oppresses citizens. Security agencies bully the masses they were established to protect.

Agberos and touts descend on motorists, traders, and anyone they can intimidate into paying for the privilege of existing in public space. Men bear down on women and children. Women, trained by the same system of domination, sometimes bear down on other women and children.

Religious leaders extract devotion, money, and silence from their congregations in the name of a God who, in every tradition I have studied, took the side of the poor. The circle closes on itself and then begins again, and there is no exit visible from inside it.

And when elections approach, this same government that has spent four years taking arrives with cups of rice and beans, throwing them from campaign buses like a farmer scattering feed, watching Nigerians scramble and calling it empathy.

The deliberate impoverishment of a citizenry to manufacture dependency is not a side effect of bad governance. It is the governance. Hungry people do not organise. Desperate people accept crumbs. Tired people do not march. This government understands that better than it understands anything in the constitution it swore to uphold.

There was a video that went around of the president telling Nigerians to manage their hunger, delivered with the calm certainty of a man who believes he is working on the economy while the people funding his salary are told to endure theirs. That single sentence is the entire hypocrisy of Nigerian governance compressed into four words.

You are told to manage your hunger while the government spends lavishly, travels abroad on a schedule that outpaces any visible progress in the economy, and calls it leadership.

Nigerian life has become an election game rather than a nation being built, and government office has become an entitlement rather than a duty, a seat you occupy because you got there, not because you serve anyone in it.

And Nigerians would resist this more forcefully if tribalism were not doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is keep us divided against our own interests. It is my tribesman, so it does not matter what he does. It is my religious brother, so we protect our own regardless of incompetence or wickedness.

That is what is killing Nigeria as much as the government itself, and capitalism thrives inside that division, because the rich eat well while there is no internal governance protecting the rights of the masses, of women and children, of people with disabilities, of workers, of anyone without power.

Even the security agencies that should protect those rights instead function as the weapons of the political class, the same role they played for colonial masters who used force to crush protest and dissent.

The baton has simply changed hands, from colonial leadership to local Nigerian leadership, and it carries the same entitlement, the same corruption, the same dictatorship, the same suppression of freedom dressed in a new flag.

Lucky Dube called the taxman a fat man who always takes and never gives. In Nigeria, the fat man sits in Abuja, flies first class or private jets on a budget the public approved, builds roads that exist only in appropriation documents, and tells the international community that the country is on a path to development while its citizens ration fuel, beg for electricity, and bury their children in hospitals that ran out of oxygen.

So I return to the question Dube asked from a stage in apartheid South Africa, a question so durable it has survived his death and crossed a continent to land here, in 2026, in a country that calls itself the giant of Africa while its people live below the floor of human dignity: what have you done for me lately, Mr Taxman?

And I add the question he did not ask but that every Nigerian deserves to ask aloud, in public, without fear of what comes after: is it greed, or is it wickedness, or is it the particular incompetence of people who have confused access to power with the capacity to wield it for something other than themselves?

Because one of those answers means the system can be reformed. The other two mean we have been paying, with our money and our silence and our lives, for something that was never designed to save us.