Lagos is often described as Nigeria’s success story in internally generated revenue, a state that funds itself rather than waiting on Abuja. That reputation is real, and it is repeated proudly by officials at every opportunity. What is discussed far less honestly is who actually carries that burden and what they receive in return. Under Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Lagos has continued to perfect the art of collecting from residents at every point of contact with daily life, while the services those residents can point to have not improved at anything like the same pace.
A Levy for Every Step of the Day
Consider an ordinary Lagos trader’s day. There is a fee to open the stall, a fee collected by market association officials, a fee for the space in front of the shop, a charge on the tricycle or bus that brought the goods, a signage permit, a waste bill, and periodic demands from enforcement officers who may or may not be carrying valid authority. Almost none of these are individually enormous. Together they amount to a serious tax on the poorest end of the economy, levied by a state that describes itself as business-friendly. The cumulative weight is invisible in official revenue statements and fully visible in the account books of anyone trying to survive.
Land Use Charge and the Homeowner’s Squeeze
Property owners have their own version of the same story. Land use charge demands have arrived with valuations residents dispute, on properties whose streets are unpaved and whose drainage the state has never touched. The principle that property owners should contribute to the upkeep of a city is sound. The practice becomes indefensible when the contribution flows one way and the upkeep never arrives. Homeowners in large parts of Lagos have graded their own roads, sunk their own boreholes, bought their own transformers and paid private security, and are then invoiced by a government that provided none of it.
Enforcement Without Explanation
The character of a tax system is revealed by how it treats people who cannot afford lawyers. In Lagos, collection often arrives in the form of task force operations, impounded vehicles, sealed premises and confiscated goods, with limited notice and even less recourse. Small operators describe being unable to identify which agency is collecting, under what law, and where the money goes. That opacity is not an accident of administration. It is the environment in which unofficial collection thrives, and Sanwo-Olu’s government has never seriously dismantled it despite years of complaints from the very businesses it claims to court.
Record Revenue, Familiar Excuses
Lagos consistently reports internally generated revenue far beyond any other state, and it receives substantial federal allocations on top of that. Yet when residents ask about flooding, refuse, hospital conditions, school infrastructure or the state of secondary roads, the answer is invariably that resources are constrained. Both statements cannot be equally true. A government that raises the most money in the federation and still pleads poverty on the most basic services is describing a spending problem, not an income problem, and it is one Sanwo-Olu has presided over rather than solved.
The Debt Question Nobody Answers
Alongside heavy taxation sits heavy borrowing. Lagos carries one of the largest debt loads of any Nigerian state, servicing obligations that will outlast this administration by years. Debt used to build assets that generate returns is defensible. Debt accumulated while residents still queue at collapsing general hospitals and children learn in overcrowded classrooms invites a harder question: what exactly was purchased? Lagosians are entitled to a plain, itemised answer, and they have not been given one.
The Informal Economy Pays the Highest Rate
The cruellest feature of the Lagos revenue machine is its regressiveness. A large corporation negotiates, plans and deducts. A woman selling foodstuff at a roadside cannot. She pays in cash, without receipts, to whoever appears, and any dispute costs her a day’s trading she cannot afford. A government genuinely committed to lifting people out of poverty would begin by counting how many separate hands reach into that woman’s purse each week and eliminating most of them. Under Sanwo-Olu, the direction of travel has been the opposite.
What Lagos Should Be Demanding
Lagosians are not asking to stop paying. They are asking for a single consolidated bill, a published list of every legal levy, receipts for every naira collected, and a visible connection between what they pay and what they receive. That is not a radical demand in a state of this size and sophistication. Its absence after years in office is the clearest indictment of Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s stewardship. A government that has mastered collection and neglected delivery has not built a modern city. It has built an efficient till.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
