IMF Says Tax the Poor: We Say Expropriate the Rich!
The IMF has delivered its instructions to the Tinubu government. In its recent 2026 Article IV consultation on Nigeria, the IMF has demanded higher VAT, an extension of VAT to fuel products, and new excise taxes on phone calls and data. It delivers these instructions to a country where 63% of the population lives in poverty and over 31 million people face acute food insecurity. The IMF knows these figures; they are in the same document, yet it recommends the tax increases anyway.
We state this emphatically: this is outright class warfare, not economic policy!
VAT is a regressive bludgeon, hitting the Nigerian worker and the petty trader on the head, while the wealthy continue to hoard and invest. Fuel and data are the lifeblood of our informal economy, but by suggesting that they should be taxed, the IMF is reaching deeper into the pockets of the starving to secure the profits of their masters!
What the IMF’s document leaves untouched tells you whose interests it serves. It says nothing about the multinational oil and gas corporations routing their Nigerian profits offshore to avoid taxation here. It says nothing about the capital and property wealth concentrated among Nigeria’s ruling class. It does not ask how a country sitting on one of the world’s largest oil reserves has arrived at 63% poverty. These questions implicate the corporations and governments that hold the majority of IMF voting power, so they go unasked, but the ordinary Nigerian is told to pay more instead.
The IMF is the financial policeman of global capitalism, created under American direction at Bretton Woods in 1944 to maintain the conditions under which Western capital moves profitably through the world. Its Article IV assessments carry no formal legal force, but a favourable IMF assessment is the seal of approval that opens Nigeria’s access to international credit markets, and the Tinubu government, which has sought over $21 billion in external loans for 2026, needs that seal.
The tax directive is its price which Tinubu and his parasites in power will agree to, but it is the ordinary Nigerian that pays it!
Tinubu’s government has already been implementing this austerity programme before this consultation! It removed the petrol subsidy on inauguration day without warning and without replacement. It devalued the naira by over 70%, repricing everything imported upward while Nigerian wages stand still. Electricity tariffs jumped over 200%. Inflation has crossed 34%, and the ordinary Nigerian feels every point of it in the market, at the bus stop, at the pharmacy. When Nigerians took to the streets in August 2024 to say they could not eat, security forces killed at least 22 of them and arrested over a thousand more. The IMF applauded these “structural reforms,” but the ordinary Nigerian buried their dead.
Who Will Fight This?
Look the NLC, as it is currently constituted, objectively cannot lead this fight. In 2024, Nigerian workers came out on an indefinite general strike and the rank and file were ready to fight, yet within two days the NLC and TUC suspended it for “renewed negotiations,” even though the government had not moved an inch and none of the structural demands had been won. The bureaucracy sent the workers back. What followed was a N70,000 minimum wage jointly presented as a victory, which was worth less in real terms than the N30,000 it replaced!
The ruling class got exactly what it needed, and the labour leadership delivered it. A leadership that suspends the workers’ weapon before the enemy has conceded anything is managing the class on behalf of those who exploit it.
The opposition political parties are a terminal dead end, and are merely rival gangs competing for the privilege of running the same system. They represent the same land-owning, contract-chasing, capital-hoarding class. Their manifestos are simply costuming. They will never legislate away the poverty that maintains their power! An election that leaves property relations intact is merely a change of guards for the prison.
So if organised labour cannot, and the political parties cannot fight the IMF, who will?
The Nigerian workers and youth are the answer! The class-conscious, disciplined workers and youth, armed with a programme that identifies the class enemy clearly, are the only force that can change the direction of this country!
The Programme And The Power To Impose It
We say it plainly: reject the IMF’s tax directive in full! Reverse the fuel subsidy removal. Index wages to inflation. The multinationals looting our resources through transfer pricing and sweetheart arrangements with our government and ruling class must be expropriated, their assets placed under public ownership and workers’ control! The debt obligations siphoning Nigerian public revenue into foreign creditor accounts must be repudiated by a workers’ government that owes its loyalty to the Nigerian people, not to the creditors who financed our exploitation!
When we say expropriate the rich, we mean it concretely!
The oil fields drained into foreign companies’ accounts for seventy years must be placed under public ownership and workers’ control, so that the revenue stays in Nigeria and is directed by the people who produce it! The land concentrated in the hands of a tiny propertied class while millions of Nigerians cannot afford a roof must be redistributed. The banks that extend credit to the wealthy and squeeze the poor with fees and impossible rates must be taken into public hands! The commanding heights of our economy must be brought under democratic workers’ control.
That is what expropriation means, and that is what it will take to end the poverty the IMF’s own document describes and then deepens!
Every concession won within the existing capitalist order can and will be reversed by that same order. The oil boom gains were clawed back in the 1980s. The 2012 strike gains evaporated. The 2024 wage was eaten by inflation. Permanent change requires the working class to hold power, and that requires a revolutionary workers’ movement with the programme, the cadres, and the roots in the class to lead.
The Naija Marxist Movement is building that movement. We do not negotiate with this system; we organise to tear it down.
For a Communist Nigeria and a Communist Africa
Workers of all countries, unite.