OPINION: When Forgery Becomes Policy

By Babayola M. Toungo

What is most troubling about the public conversation surrounding the new Tax Act slated for implementation on January 1st, 2026 is not the predictable dispute over fiscal burdens or economic philosophy. It is the collapse of moral seriousness in our democratic life.

The debate has been reduced to administrative housekeeping – calls for suspension, review, harmonization – while the foundational issue is quietly sidestepped – a grievous criminal violation may have been committed against the Nigerian people by the very institutions constitutionally charged with protecting the sanctity of law.

This is not merely a policy controversy. It is a question of democratic ethics, ideological coherence, and the moral legitimacy of state power.

If the widely reported claims are accurate – that provisions appeared in the Tax Act after legislative passage – then Nigeria is confronted with a constitutional abomination. Either the executive branch unilaterally altered the law, or the National Assembly certified and transmitted a document that was not the one debated and passed.

In ideological terms, this is not reform gone wrong; it is state crime. One scenario represents executive usurpation of legislative authority; the other, legislative fraud against the electorate. Both amount to a violent rupture of the social contract.

Yet the language dominating the public space is disturbingly bloodless. “Suspend implementation.” “Clarify grey areas.” “Engage stakeholders.” These are the vocabularies of technocracy, not justice. They are the rhetorical tools of a political culture that has learned to manage wrongdoing rather than confront it.

This is where ideology matters. Liberal democracy is not sustained by elections alone; it is sustained by procedural sanctity and moral accountability. The rule of law is not simply about having laws – it is about the integrity of how those laws come into being. Once that integrity is compromised, legality becomes theatre and compliance becomes coercion. Citizens are no longer governed; they are managed.

What we are witnessing is the triumph of elite pragmatism over democratic principle. The Nigerian ruling class, across party lines, has long internalized the belief that stability matters more than justice, that continuity of governance outweighs the sanctity of process.

This is why crimes are routinely reframed as “errors,” and why impunity is defended in the language of national interest. It is the ideology of convenience – an unspoken consensus that power must never be meaningfully questioned, only gently negotiated.

This moment is particularly dangerous because it further entrenches a culture of constitutional relativism – the idea that laws are flexible instruments to be reshaped after the fact by those who control the state. Once that norm is accepted, there is no logical stopping point. Today it is a tax statute. Tomorrow it could be an electoral framework. The day after, a constitutional amendment quietly doctored to suit the ambitions of incumbents.

And notice the asymmetry of expectation. Citizens are told to obey the law strictly, to pay taxes promptly, to respect institutions even when they fail them. But the same institutions feel no reciprocal obligation to respect the law in its making. This is not democracy; it is authoritarianism in civilian dress.

From a political economy perspective, the implications are even more corrosive. Taxation rests on consent. Citizens comply not merely because the state has coercive capacity, but because taxation is understood as a civic duty underpinned by legitimacy. When the process that produces tax laws is corrupted, taxation itself begins to resemble extortion. The state forfeits the moral authority to demand sacrifice while shielding its own lawlessness.

What makes the current reaction so unsettling is the evident public acclimatization to elite criminality. We are being subtly trained to accept that the best outcome is delay, not justice; suspension, not accountability.

This is how democratic erosion becomes normalized – not through dramatic ruptures, but through quiet compromises with wrongdoing. Each time society agrees to “move on” without consequences, the boundary of the unacceptable is pushed further outward. This is not accidental. It is structural.

A legislature widely perceived as transactional and compromised lacks the moral confidence to police itself. An executive habituated to governing by fiat sees process as an inconvenience. Together, they produce a governance culture in which law is something to be edited, not obeyed.

The deeper tragedy, however, lies beyond the institutions. It lies in the question this episode forces upon the citizenry: have we so lost our sense of right and wrong that we can no longer recognize a crime when it is presented plainly before us?

When forgery can occur at the highest levels of state and still be treated as a technical dispute, something profound has broken in our collective political consciousness.

Suspending implementation of the Tax Act may be administratively sensible, but it is morally insufficient. If a crime has been committed – and all available evidence suggests that one has – then suspension is not a remedy; it is an evasion.

Democratic systems survive not because leaders are perfect, but because violations carry consequences. Where there are no consequences, there is no law – only power. This is therefore a defining moment.

Nigerians must decide whether the republic is governed by rules or by expediency, by principle or by convenience. A society that cannot defend the integrity of its laws at the point of their making has already surrendered the future enforcement of those laws.

The real danger is not the Tax Act itself. The real danger is the quiet consensus forming around the idea that criminality at the top is tolerable as long as it is efficiently managed. That is how republics die – not in chaos, but in compliance.

And so the question remains, stark and unavoidable: are we still a people capable of moral outrage in defense of democracy, or have we accepted wrongdoing as the permanent operating system of governance?