Nigeria To Impose New Taxes on Luxury Goods

Nigeria plans introduce taxes on luxury goods next year in a bid to boost non-oil revenue and improve budgetary performance going forward, its finance minister has said.
Zainab Ahmed, said the government is planning to raise some form of taxes on luxury goods and reduce taxes for small and medium scale enterprises as a part of major tax reform in the coming year.
“We are exploring the way to increase taxes as well as reduce taxes in some sectors. For Small and Medium Enterprises, what will happen is to reduce taxes. But there are some special taxes that we will be looking at imposing,” she said.
According to her, luxury taxes will be imposed on private jets, yacht owners, but failed to provide details on how the government intends to carry out such exercise.
“For example, luxury taxes. If you have a private jet, we will be taxing you specially for that. If you have a yacht, we will be charging you for that and also in terms of excise duties; there are also some new areas where excise duties will be introduced.
“We haven’t got all the approvals but one of the major areas might be that of carbonated drinks produced in the country.”
Analysts, however, noted that such plan was not new as the previous minister of finance Kemi Adeosun had suggested such plans in the time past but was shut down by many highly placed Nigerians in government.
Nigeria currently spent about 70 percent of its revenue on debt service and in its 2019 budget proposal intends to cut back on borrowing and raise income from non-oil sector.
Global oil price has fallen to around $45/barrel against the $60/barrel proposed by the government in its 2019 budget submitted to the National Assembly last week.