Nigeria’s low tax collection poses poor health, education —Bill Gates

Blessing Taiwo

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has said tax collection in Nigeria is low, posing a risk of inadequate financing for critical sectors.

Gates noted that the health and education sectors could be greatly affected by the rate of tax collection.

He emphasised this at the Pan-African youth dialogue on nutrition in Abuja, where issues about financing mechanisms the Nigerian government could adopt towards funding large-scale public health interventions were discussed.

According to Gates, for citizens to gain confidence in the government’s ability to deliver quality healthcare, there must be a commitment to ensure that the funding of health programmes is well managed.

He urged the government to build credibility in health programmes in order to attract citizenry support for increased primary healthcare funding as the country works toward a better fiscal flexibility.

“Over time, there are plans for Nigeria to fund the government more than it does today. The actual tax collection in Nigeria is actually pretty low.

“If citizens want the education and the health things, as they develop the confidence that these programmes can be very well run, and our foundation is involved with a lot of the exemplars that are showing the way in terms of making sure the money is spent really well, running a very efficient primary health care system where the employees are doing great work, the centres are where they should be, you don’t have underloaded centres or overloaded centres.

“It’s exciting that we are driving the credibility of those health programmes and so that the citizens will feel like primary health care is amongst the priorities that should be very funded as you get some fiscal flexibility,” the philanthropist said.