Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has injected fresh urgency into the debate over Nigeria’s new tax regime, warning that discrepancies between laws passed by the National Assembly and their gazetted versions threaten not just tax reform, but the very foundations of constitutional governance.
Rather than framing his intervention as partisan opposition, Atiku positioned his criticism as a defence of due process, legislative authority and the rule of law. He cautioned that allowing altered laws to stand would normalise a dangerous precedent in which procedure is sacrificed for convenience.
At the centre of the controversy is the Senate’s confirmation that the gazetted version of the recently enacted tax laws does not fully reflect what lawmakers approved. For Atiku, this admission alone signals a serious breach.
“A law published in a form that was never passed by the National Assembly is not merely flawed—it does not exist in the eyes of the law,” he said in a statement released late Sunday through his media aide, Paul Ibe.
He described the situation as illegal and unconstitutional, arguing that once a bill is altered after passage without being returned to parliament, the integrity of the entire legislative process collapses.
Atiku grounded his argument firmly in constitutional provisions, citing Section 58 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), which clearly outlines the stages of lawmaking: passage by both chambers, presidential assent, and publication in the government gazette.
“Gazetting does not make law,” he stressed. “It is a clerical act of publication, not a tool for correction, amendment or substitution.”
In his view, any post-passage insertion, deletion or modification—no matter how minor it is portrayed—crosses a legal red line.
“Once you alter a bill without legislative approval, it stops being a clerical issue and becomes forgery,” Atiku said, adding that no administrative directive from the leadership of the National Assembly can cure such a defect.
He also warned against reported moves to quickly re-gazette the disputed laws without first subjecting them to fresh legislative scrutiny, describing such steps as an attempt to paper over illegality rather than resolve it.
“Illegality cannot be cured by speed,” he said. “The only lawful solution is to return the bills to the National Assembly, re-pass them in identical form, obtain fresh presidential assent, and then gazette them properly.”
Atiku was careful to distance his position from blanket opposition to tax reform, noting that Nigeria urgently needs fiscal restructuring. His concern, he said, is that reforms pursued outside constitutional boundaries risk undermining public trust and weakening democratic institutions.
“This is not about resisting tax reform,” he explained. “It is about ensuring that reform is rooted in legality, transparency and respect for democratic procedure.”
Earlier in the week, the former vice president had called for the immediate suspension of the disputed tax laws and demanded a thorough investigation into how the discrepancies occurred. In a personally signed statement, he warned that allowing the alterations to stand would amount to an assault on legislative supremacy.
He urged the executive to halt implementation of the affected laws, called on the National Assembly to correct the anomalies through lawful means, and appealed to the judiciary to intervene where unconstitutional provisions persist.
As debate intensifies, Atiku’s warning reframes the issue beyond taxation: it is now a test of whether Nigeria’s democratic institutions can enforce their own rules—or quietly allow them to be bent.
Atiku flags rule of law concerns as tax law controversy deepens
