The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, on Monday admonished northerners to refrain from opposing President Bola Tinubu’s proposed tax reform bills.
The tax reform bills have since heated the polity with several northerners, including governors, lawmakers and other stakeholders criticising the bills as anti-north.
They had claimed that the bills, if passed into law would impoverish the north.
Speaking during Channels Television’s town hall meeting on the bills, Dogara stated that governors and other elites criticising the bills were doing so from an uninformed perspective.
He urged them to consider the benefits of the reforms, especially in addressing key issues across the country.
He said: “I want to talk to my brothers in the North. I don’t think this is the time for us to begin to condemn the president and to begin to say that on account of these bills, he is anti-north because I want to remind us that the president has done something that is significant.
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“If he can pursue this to the end, it would be that there is no northern leader of my lifetime that has done what the president has done for the north. And I will tell you [what he has achieved] is the creation of the livestock ministry. There is a global business around that.
“The global market size of dairies of beef in the next three years will rise to about $2.5 trillion. You can Google it. So if in the north, we are able to organise ourselves in such a way that we can corner just 5%, just 5% of this global market size of dairies and beef, I tell you that gives us $250 billion.
“We don’t need VAT from any state in Nigeria to survive. The North can survive on its own. We are the most endowed part of Nigeria.”
Dogara also dismissed claims of due consultations before the introduction of the bills, pointing out that what matters is whether the reforms are right and not the political motives behind it.
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