MY attention was drawn recently to page 18 of Vanguard of Monday October 12, 2015 where one Archbishop God-Do-Well Avwomakpa, the South-South President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, published an article railing against the payment of tax. It would appear that Avwomakpa is quite determined not to pay his taxes and similarly prepared to discourage others from doing so. I find this rather surprising for I would have expected someone in Avwomakpa’s position to have long realised that for government to function, it simply has to levy and collect taxes. When I served in government, I discovered that apart from my basic salary, Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan was taxing even my allowances and fringe benefits as well. I did not complain; I simply paid.

Avwomakpa claimed that our Lord Jesus Christ paid tax for himself and His disciples but not for the Church. This clearly reveals a rather defective grasp of theology on the part of the bishop. Theologically speaking, a church is not necessarily a building. It is indeed a place, as certain authorities proclaim, but only because that place is where people gather together in fellowship and love. A church is therefore essentially a CONGREGATION, a religious congregation basically being a gathering of human beings who by the regular exercise of agape love for one another confer hallowed status on the place thereby making it a church. Thus, where two or more are gathered in His Name, He is there.

No matter how grand a cathedral may be, if no believers had ever showed up there to worship, it is not a church. Jesus and the Disciples are the highest and purest church there has and will ever be. By our Lord paying taxes for Himself and the Disciples, He had paid tax on behalf of the Church, thereby establishing the fact that churches, mosques and other religious institutions are not at all above the law and must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s just as they must render unto God what is God’s.

If the Son of God, Himself, could pay His tax and was indeed generous and magnanimous enough to pay the taxes of His followers, how can any Bishop not want to pay his own tax? The Lord Jesus was merely leading by example to show that no one is above the law and that everyman must pay his tax. How therefore, can someone of a Bishop’s ranking, discourage others from paying their taxes? I am sure that if I showed up at Avwomakpa’s church next Sunday and dissuaded his congregation from giving their offerings, he would take it as a personal attack on his church. If his parishioners can give offerings without demanding account, then he must pay his tax, without which government will eventually collapse.

The issue of encouraging beggarly citizens to bring their offerings and tithes to God and not pay their taxes is completely not tenable. There is no evidence for Avwomakpa’s position that tithes and offerings necessarily bring blessings while taxes do not. Ours is the most religious nation on earth and the most backward and corrupt of all in spite of our alms, tithes and offerings. God is not interested in anybody’s money. Rather He is hungry to feed the poor and not to collect what little they have. The welfare of the masses was what  Jesus Christ dedicated His entire life to and nothing secures it better than the redistribution of wealth through taxing and spending. Taxes are therefore, actually more capable of bringing blessings, than tithes and offerings.

Black men are notorious for not paying tax. The blessed Aba women threw caution to the wind and caused a hell of commotion in the 1930s over tax. Mrs. Ransome-Kuti chased a king from his kingdom because of tax. The citizens of Freetown, Sierra Leone, irrationally burnt down the American Embassy to ashes over taxes imposed by the British and not even by the Americans! The matter led to a landmark case in international law. Whenever the colonial masters showed up to collect tax, our people would run into the bush instead of paying up like responsible citizens. Yet ,we are ever willing to pay daily contribution, pay town union dues and settle meeting money. The result of such a deplorable attitude to payment of taxes is a poverty-stricken continent with only about ten percent of the world’s population yet fifty percent of its poor, hungry and miserable people.

And by the way, who are the so-called righteous men Avwomakpa claimed were ruling before. I doubt if there has ever been a righteous government in Delta state since 1999. It has been corruption galore for the past sixteen years continuing into the present dispensation in which Avwomakpa’s ‘righteous’ rulers and bosom friends held sway.

It is most shameful that no one wants to pay tax yet everyone expects government to perform miracles from oil. It is even more unfortunate for a Bishop to surreptitiously threaten a conflict between church and state, apparently because he would rather keep all his parishioners’ offerings to himself. Where people do not pay taxes, they exclude themselves from ownership of their own government. Above all other guarantees, it is the payment of taxes that secures the social contract for the governed.

If apart from normal offerings,  Avwomakpa can still go ahead and demand a further ten percent of his congregation’s earnings as tithes – an obscure practice confined to a brief period in Old Testament times that Jesus Christ did not indulged in – then the tax collector can demand a percentage of that income from him. It is not double or multiple taxation at all. It is Avwomakpa fulfilling his civic responsibilities by paying his tax like any responsible man.

It should be clear to anyone who can think clearly that we must all pay our taxes. Where else is government going to find money with which to work? We all clamour for services and infrastructure and there is no one in sight willing to pay his taxes. The price of oil has already tanked and my prayer is that it will remain so until we grow beyond oil and develop more sustainable resources thereby lifting our economy from its mono-product status. Nigeria is not oil-rich. Being oil-rich is a function of production divided by population. In that context, while the United Arab Emitates, Kuwait or Equitorial Guinea are oil-rich, Nigeria is desperately oil-poor with some 170 million hungry citizens dependent on a paltry 2 million plus barrels a day. Where citizens in such a country refuse to pay tax, I doubt that Avwomakpa will find it funny should the masses troop to him and his colleagues to perform the miracle of feeding five thousand people with a few loaves of bread and a handful of fish on a daily basis.

Avwomakpa claimed that no one can tax God. I rather very much doubt that it is the intention of the Revenue Board to tax God – where will they find Him anyway that they might levy taxes on The Most High? They are only interested in taxing Avwomakpa and his likes, and the last time I checked, Avwomakpa was a human being in flesh and blood just like me, and most certainly not any kind of god – tin god, demigod or small god – not to talk of Almighty God, Himself! This matter does not concern God at all so His Most Holy Name must not be dragged into a clear law enforcement matter by Avwomakpa. His Only Begotten Son has already set the standard from time immemorial for everyone to pay his tax and by paying His own, absolutely no one else should be allowed to make himself into an outlaw on whom taxes may not be levied.

It is quite impressive that our Lord Jesus who could not even afford a roof over his head still realized the importance of taxation to public welfare that not only did He pay His tax, He paid for his fellow men as well. Avwomakpa’s prosperity-preaching colleagues have been busy building palaces and buying private jets with tithes and offerings of their wretched parishioners, many of whom can barely afford to eat. He is a rich man and must pay his tax whether he likes it or not given that those of us who have no congregations to collect tithes and offerings from and must work hard for every dime we earn are quite willing to pay our own taxes. In fact, our dear Avwomakpa must be Christlike and forthright enough to lead by example by paying tax both for himself and for his parishioners. Since churches and mosques are some of the most booming enterprises in our Stone Age socio-economic structure today, they represent a treasure trove of taxable income.

There are simply too many people making good money and paying little or no tax. The tax authorities should not wait for people to come and pay their taxes. Such an infantile template for gathering the fiscus has simply never worked anywhere. Taxes are hardly ever willingly paid. They are only reliably collected on demand. The tax collectors should be proactive enough to assess the taxable population and collect revenue. They have the authority of the Son of God, Himself, to do so.

Unfortunately, my investigations indicate that the Board of Internal Revenue in Delta remains insufficiently abreast of its mandate, which to me is hardly a surprise at all, since, as elsewhere in Nigeria, we have always depended on oil. In spite of the spirited defense, civil servants in the board, put up for its chairman and membership, I suspect that instead of proactively and creatively mobilizing the taxable population to pay up, the board is satisfied to remain indolent, probably with unwarranted dreams that citizens will simply willingly cough out their taxes without being adequately sensitized on the need to pay.

That aside, I thank God that Avwomakpa’s name is God-Do-Well. If indeed God has done well for him, he should be quite willing to reciprocate by doing well for his less privileged fellow men by paying his and their taxes as well. It is a serious criminal offense for anyone to bluntly refuse to pay his taxes and an even more grievous offence for anyone to encourage others to break the law by following suit. I demand that the Delta Board of Internal Revenue must immediately track down anyone discouraging others from paying their taxes, greet them properly and demand their tax with all sense of determination to collect the same. In fact, Avwomkpa and his colleagues may well owe a backlog of taxes and when they are assessed, they should be forced to cough out the money and pay up like the law abiding citizens I believe they are. If they refuse to pay, the tax collectors should greet them respectfully once more and promptly haul them before courts of competent jurisdiction to face the music. No man is God and no one is above the law, Bishop, Archbishop, pastor, layman or lawyer that I am.

Jesutega Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Sapele.