Good morning,
The EU has finally told us what we already knew. Its observation hub says votes were sold for up to ₦50,000 during the Ekiti and Osun governorship elections, with voters displaying marked ballots to party agents before payment. The report was released this week. The elections were held in June and August. No arrests have been made. The observers documented the crime in real time and then went home, returning months later with a PDF and a recommendation that Nigerian authorities prosecute offenders whose trails have long gone cold. If the EU had released this report a week after each election, perhaps something could have been done while the bank accounts were still warm. Instead, we get a post-mortem. Election observation has become a genre of literature, not a tool of accountability.
And now Ghana wants to tax the digital economy at 20 per cent, and someone in Abuja is probably taking notes. Ghana’s new VAT regime imposes a 20 per cent effective tax on digital services, and Nigeria already has a 7.5 per cent VAT on imported digital services under the Tax Reform Acts 2025, which took effect in January. A 20 per cent levy on digital services in a country where 70 per cent of workers now use AI and data consumption hit 11.94 million terabytes in eight months, nearly matching all of 2025, would be a tax on productivity itself. The digital economy is one of the few sectors still growing without government help. Tax it at 20 per cent, and you will not raise revenue. You will kill the goose and wonder why the eggs stopped coming.
The rest of the day’s news reads like a country being squeezed from every direction. Nigeria risks losing more than $1 billion in annual export earnings if cocoa and other commodities fail to comply with the EU Deforestation Regulation, with 89 per cent of cocoa exports going to Europe and only half of the 350,000 smallholder plots geolocated. A Kwara Poly student, Sheu, borrowed his brother’s motorcycle and was killed by a Conoil truck whose driver fled, his body buried as unidentified and later exhumed by his family. Cholera is killing people in Zamfara’s displacement camps where insecurity has closed clinics and driven health workers away, part of a nationwide outbreak that has recorded over 69,000 cases and 439 deaths this year. NAFDAC seized ₦2 billion worth of counterfeit alcohol at Trade Fair Complex, where expired drinks were being revalidated and returned to shelves. And residents of Igbokoda in Ondo State are now afraid to drink from their river, because the NAF plane that crashed there is decaying in the water that feeds the treatment plant.
The government is trying, in its way. The NYSC feeding budget for orientation camps has been increased, though the new allocation does not take effect until next year, leaving this batch to manage on the old rates. The IMF has urged targeted cash transfers for vulnerable households, warning that growth without relief is not enough. Food inflation is 19.57 per cent. The poor do not need a forecast. They need money in hand before the next market day.
A report too late to prosecute. A tax too heavy to survive. A river too polluted to drink. A driver too fast to stop. A budget too slow to reach the hungry. These are not separate stories. They are the same story: a country where the warnings arrive after the damage, and the systems meant to prevent it are always one step behind.
Warmly,
Lolade