Nigerian Consumers Deserve the Truth About Where the SSB Tax Money Goes

LAGOS, NIGERIA — The Foundation for Consumer Freedom Advancement (FCFA) is responding today to the public awareness campaign launched by Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) on Nigeria's Sugar-Sweetened Beverage tax. The CAPPA campaign calls on the Federal Government to raise the existing ₦10-per-litre excise duty, citing the World Health Organization's recommendation of at least a 20% increase in retail price as the threshold needed for SSB taxes to meaningfully change consumption.

CAPPA's campaign is built on a real public health concern. Nigeria's burden of non-communicable diseases is rising. More than 70% of Nigerians are paying out-of-pocket for healthcare, and households are absorbing the cost of conditions that effective preventive policy could reduce. The campaign deserves engagement, not dismissal. But the question Nigerian consumers should be asking, before the conversation moves to a higher rate, is what happened to the revenue from the tax that already exists.

A Tax Without a Trace

The ₦10-per-litre SSB excise duty was introduced through the 2021 Finance Act with a clear public health rationale. Nigerians were told the revenue would help fund the prevention and treatment of the very diseases the tax was meant to discourage. The Minister of Finance, presenting the levy, framed it as a dual-purpose intervention. It would discourage harmful consumption and generate ring-fenced revenue for health programmes.

Two years on, neither half of that promise has been independently verified. There is no public reporting on how much revenue the SSB tax has generated since 2022. There is no published breakdown of where the money has gone. There is no specific health programme that consumers can point to as the visible result of the tax they have been paying. Federal health spending has not visibly risen in line with the projected revenue from the levy. And no agency has been formally tasked with tracking the connection between SSB tax collections and NCD outcomes.

The accountability infrastructure that would make the existing tax credible to the Nigerians paying it has, in two years, never been built.

The Wrong Debate

FCFA's position is that the current debate is asking the wrong question. The debate, as currently framed by CAPPA and other public health advocates, is whether to raise the rate from ₦10 per litre toward something closer to the WHO's 20% retail price benchmark. The better question is whether the existing tax has done what it was supposed to do, and if not, why not.

Raising the rate of a tax that already lacks transparency only deepens the consumer cost. It does not deliver the promised health outcome. The outcome, as originally designed, requires earmarking, public reporting, and accountability. None of those exist today. Adding more revenue to a system that has not demonstrated it can disburse the existing revenue toward its stated purpose is not public health policy. It is fiscal policy in public health language.

A Better Path

The Foundation for Consumer Freedom Advancement calls on the Federal Government to publish the SSB tax revenue figures from 2022, identify the specific health programmes that have received any portion of those revenues, and commit to a binding earmarking framework with transparent annual reporting before any rate increase is considered.

Public health and consumer protection are not opposites. But they are also not the same thing. A regressive consumption tax that hits ordinary Nigerians at the checkout, with no visible link to a healthcare benefit, is not consumer protection regardless of the language used to defend it. If the answer to the public health question is yes, raise the tax, then the answer to the accountability question must come first. Nigerians deserve both.