By VICTOR-BANDELE DADA

The central paradox of the modern nation-state has reached a point of systemic tension: governments are increasingly attempting to extract higher revenues from economies that are themselves structurally weakened. Across many developing societies, taxation has become one of the most visible points of friction between the state and its citizens. Governments introduce new levies, strengthen enforcement mechanisms, and widen the tax net, while businesses and households struggle under the weight of declining productivity, rising costs, and shrinking opportunities. Yet the deeper question is not about taxation itself. Every functioning society requires public revenue.

The real question is about sequence.

Can a state sustainably extract prosperity from a population that has not first been enabled to create prosperity? Historically, taxation was one of the foundations of organized civilization. From ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome, early states relied on tribute, agricultural levies, labor obligations, and monetary taxation to sustain administration, fund defense, and build infrastructure. As modern states evolved, taxation became part of a broader social contract: citizens contributed financially, while governments provided security, justice, infrastructure, and the enabling conditions for economic life.

For a time, this model worked.

But in many societies today, that equilibrium is breaking down. The state is increasingly withdrawing from its role as the primary provider of essential enabling systems. Electricity is privately generated. Security is privately supplemented. Education and healthcare are heavily privately financed. Infrastructure gaps are filled by households and communities themselves. Yet the tax system continues to expand. This creates what can be described as a “double burden”: citizens pay privately for survival systems while also being taxed as if those systems are fully functional. At this point, taxation begins to shift from a tool of development into a source of structural strain. The deeper issue, however, is not fiscal policy. It is economic architecture.

A useful way to understand this is through a simple principle: no system can sustainably harvest outputs it has not first cultivated. A farmer does not repeatedly harvest a field without replenishing the soil. When soil fertility collapses, productivity collapses. The same principle applies to economic systems. In governance terms, the “soil” of prosperity includes reliable infrastructure, stable institutions, energy access, digital connectivity, and a regulatory environment that supports enterprise and risk-taking.

Where these foundations are weak, excessive extraction does not increase productivity—it reduces it. It pushes businesses into informality, discourages investment, weakens small enterprises, and gradually erodes the tax base itself. Over time, this produces a paradox: governments increase efforts to extract revenue from a shrinking productive base, accelerating the very decline they seek to reverse. One of the most visible outcomes of this structural imbalance is migration. Human beings have always moved toward opportunity. Migration, in its historical form, has been one of civilization’s greatest forces of renewal, enabling trade, innovation, and cultural exchange. But in many contemporary contexts, migration is no longer primarily driven by exploration or aspiration. It is increasingly driven by constraint.

When domestic systems fail to generate sufficient opportunity, migration becomes a rational survival response. In this context, migration is not merely a social issue. It is a systemic indicator of governance stress. It signals that the internal economy is no longer absorbing its own human potential. This raises a deeper civilizational question. Perhaps the central responsibility of governance should not begin with the question: “How much more can we collect?” It should begin with a fundamentally different question: “How much more can we enable society to create?” This shift marks the boundary between two models of governance.

The first is an extraction-centered model, where the state primarily operates as a collector of revenue. The second is a prosperity-centered model, where the state functions as an architect of productive systems. Emerging within this second model is the concept of Prosperity Governance and Management (PGM). Under PGM, governance is not defined by the efficiency of extraction, but by the effectiveness of creation. The state becomes a systems architect responsible for aligning the conditions under which human potential is converted into productive output. Communities are no longer treated as administrative units alone, but as interconnected, productive ecosystems. Infrastructure becomes an enabler of enterprise. Education becomes aligned with economic pathways. Policy becomes a mechanism for unlocking latent productivity rather than constraining it. Within such a framework, taxation does not disappear. It is re-situated.

It ceases to be the starting point of economic strategy and becomes the outcome of economic success. Prosperity generates productivity. Productivity generates wealth. And wealth naturally generates sustainable public revenue. This is the self-financing logic of prosperity systems. The deeper transformation required, therefore, is not simply fiscal reform. It is a shift in the logic of governance itself—from extraction to creation, from depletion to cultivation, from control to enablement. Civilization may therefore be approaching a critical turning point. Governments cannot sustainably tax their way into prosperity. They must design their way into it. The future challenge of governance is not simply how to fund the state. It is how to generate the prosperity that sustains it.

•Dada is CEO, DESI Consultants Ltd, Lagos.