




Victory Essien🌵✨
244 posts

@ui_veaky
UIUX Designer | Website Designer | Mobile App Designer | Virtual Assistant







My aunt just called me in tears. She has over 4 million naira in her savings account money from selling the last family property in the village , hawking sales + everything they scraped together to bury her late husband. Now she's panicking because she got an SMS telling her to file her tax before the March 31 deadline or face ₦100k fine + ₦50k every month after. This woman is an average business owner. She's been hawking pepper soup for over 30 years. Mid-50s, informal sector, no real profit most days. The little cash she makes gets eaten up the same day by food, transport, and life. She sleeps in the market almost daily because the distance from home is too much, bad road,traffic, cost of transportation. She has 4 kids in university each paying over ₦200k hostel rent in different states, plus school fees and other school stuffs that keep piling up. No light at home since last year. The road to their community is terrible; you have to climb "pako" just to enter. Transformer is dead, and they were asked to donate to buy a new one since early last year, she stays in Lagos. Her husband died painfully couldn't swallow food or water suddenly. They ran tests, endoscopy, MRI, everything... doctors said he was "fine" but the only specialist hospital wanted ₦850k for 3 days admission before they can look into what they could give him to fix feeding after spending a lot on texts etc. LUTH said come back in a month. He starved to death. And now government wants to tax her? Or deduct from her savings? She asked me brokenly: "Even if they want the ₦100k, why can't they just take ₦1k monthly until I'm stable?" Bros/sis, this is the reality for millions. No jobs. Girls I grew up with doing hookup just to survive. People turning to drugs to numb the pain. Minimum wage 70k (if you’re lucky enough to see one that really pays such) You’ll likely see a job paying 70k mostly where rents are 1.5m for a room self contain. So earning legally that’s 840k, we can’t even afford rent after Uni as an adult. The first ₦800k income is supposedly tax-free now, but how does that help when daily expenses swallow everything before you even calculate "profit"? It's insulting. No light, bad roads, hospitals that kill instead of heal, APC still campaigning with fake light promises after 4years and from worst electricity supply to none available now, meanwhile Abia state delivered stable light under same time frame by Alex Otti. Politicians looting freely (join APC and your sins are forgiven, apparently), yet they squeeze the struggling market woman, bus driver, and agbero who are barely online. Senator Amaechi once said Nigerians are too dumb to do anything and people laughed. Now this feels like the test. I didn't know what exact advice to give her because the system feels designed to punish the masses and keep them in chains, no different from how the white man kept us in chains. Filing might be the "safe" thing, but when you're this broke and broken, even that small process feels like another mountain. You have to pay an accountant say 20k out of 70k to help you arrange your books to file? Hopefully by 1st of April, it’s either April fool or banks will be filled with blood if 100k is deducted from people’ savings. That’s probably how it plays at this stage, Already told my cousin not to go to work, she works at UBA, those ones hmm, my no talk. It’s a wake up call to every bus driver, youth and market women and men who are mostly not online, this govt need to fix things right now. If Nigeria remains the same after this then to the general public that should tell you that we are never coming back and this might as well be the hell you’ve all been scared to go to while aiming for Heaven when you die. What should she do? Honest opinions needed especially from people who understand the rules for informal sector. #NigeriaTax #CostOfLivingCrisis #StrugglingNigerians --- By: The Benin girl









