By Chris Curtis
What exactly is the Nigerian government taxing its people for?
Is it for the land the state purchased and built houses on for citizens?
Is it for the solar-powered homes, constant electricity, or clean borehole water provided to every household?
Is it for the security that allows people to sleep without fear?
Is it for the cars, industries, jobs, or quality healthcare enjoyed by the people?
What, then, is the moral basis for taxation?
Taxation is not theft when it is anchored in responsibility. But when a government consistently fails to provide the most basic human needs—security, dignity, healthcare, education, and opportunity. Taxation becomes an extraction without trust. Authority that demands responsibility while refusing accountability is not governance; it is coercion clothed in legality.
From birth till now, as I grow older, I have not benefited from the foundational rights any functional state owes its citizens—not as charity, but as obligation. This is not a personal grievance; it is a generational reality shared by millions of Nigerians.
My deepest concern, however, is not only government failure—it is youth docility. Silence has been normalized. Endurance has been mistaken for wisdom. And resignation has emboldened irresponsibility across successive administrations.
History is unambiguous: oppression does not survive by force alone; it survives by compliance.
Peaceful protests have repeatedly been met with state force. Yet mass relocation—Japa—does not weaken injustice; it strengthens it. A system left unchallenged grows more confident in its excesses.
A government capable of presenting a tax regime fundamentally different from what its own legislature passed is capable of anything. A government whose strongest performance metric is propaganda—distorting facts, suppressing truth, and weaponizing narratives—cannot be trusted with public funds. A system that recruits hungry and unemployed youths to defend the indefensible has already declared war on conscience.
Division remains its most effective weapon: religion against religion, tribe against tribe, ethnicity against ethnicity, class against class. While citizens argue, the common inheritance is looted.
Scripture warns us: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”
Let it be stated clearly: righteous disobedience against institutional oppression is not a crime; it is a moral duty. This is not a call to violence—violence only replaces one tyrant with another. It is a call to lawful, disciplined resistance grounded in constitutional and international law.
Both Nigerian law and international human rights frameworks affirm the right of citizens to peaceful protest, participation in governance, and human dignity.
If we do not act now, what will we tell the next generation—that we watched quietly while corruption hollowed out our society?
The Holy Scripture does not say, “May the Lord perfect the complaints of your mouth.” It says, “May the Lord perfect the work of your hands.” Help from above responds to steps taken below.
This is a call to Nigerian youth—in the judiciary, security services, electoral bodies, workplaces, and streets—to rise above tribe, religion, and party loyalty, and to use every constitutional apparatus available to reclaim the nation.
We do not leave Nigeria because we hate her. We leave because a system has vowed to keep us backward in perpetuity. But no nation is healed by abandonment.
Nigeria will rise again—not by miracle, but by the deliberate actions of her youth.
✉️ chriscurtiswrites@gmail.com
