At its most basic, government is not an abstract machine, it is a collective expression of the people. Its primary mandate is straightforward: preserve security, maintain peace, and deploy the coercive and coordinating power of the state through law enforcement and public institutions. To do this, it draws resources from the same people it serves, redistributing them into infrastructure, healthcare, education, and national security. Supplementary income may come from state assets or services, but taxation remains the backbone of public finance.
That is the foundational contract. And like all contracts, it is governed by constraints, most notably, arithmetic.
From the 1980s onward, a distinct ideological shift emerged, championed by leaders such as Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Their shared doctrine sought to reduce the size and scope of the state, arguing that markets, not governments, are the most efficient allocators of resources. Central to this worldview was the promise that if individuals, particularly the most economically productive, were allowed to accumulate wealth with minimal interference, prosperity would “trickle down” to the broader population.
Four decades on, the results are uneven at best and disingenuous at worst.
The first half of the proposition, wealth accumulation at the top, has undeniably materialised. Capital has flourished, markets have expanded, and high earners have benefited from sustained tax reductions and regulatory easing. But the second half, the equitable diffusion of that wealth, has persistently underperformed. Income inequality has widened across most advanced economies, social mobility has stagnated, and public services in many cases have been hollowed out.
Yet the ideology endures.
Tax policy has become the principal instrument of this persistence. Successive governments have pursued reductions in top marginal tax rates while simultaneously introducing layers of complexity into the tax code. The result is a system where those with the means, access to sophisticated financial advice and legal structuring, can significantly reduce or even eliminate their tax liabilities. Meanwhile, the average taxpayer operates within a far narrower band of flexibility, effectively underwriting the system.
This is not merely a policy preference; it is a structural contradiction.
Politicians continue to promise two mutually incompatible outcomes: lower taxation and unchanged (or even expanded) public services. But government finance is not immune to basic fiscal constraints. If revenue declines without a corresponding reduction in expenditure, the gap must be filled, through borrowing, austerity, or the degradation of public goods. There is no fourth option hidden in ideological optimism.
The claim that a state can simultaneously shrink its revenue base and maintain its obligations is not innovative thinking, it is a mathematical impossibility. And presenting it as otherwise is not just misleading; it borders on a breach of the public trust.
If a government genuinely believes that society has evolved to a point where the state can retreat, where individuals can privately secure their own healthcare, education, infrastructure, and even elements of security, then it must make that case explicitly. It must articulate, in clear and unambiguous terms, that the social contract itself is being rewritten. That citizens are no longer participants in a shared system of mutual provision, but consumers in a fragmented marketplace of essential services.
What it cannot do is maintain the rhetoric of collective provision while dismantling the financial architecture that sustains it.
Because in the end, governance is not a philosophical abstraction, it is an exercise in resource allocation under constraint. You can argue for a larger state or a smaller one. You can advocate higher taxes or lower taxes. But you cannot, without veering into fiction, argue for both lower inputs and unchanged outputs.
The numbers simply do not permit it.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 