Paper short abstract:

Benue State's reintroduction of tax in a largely agrarian region after 30 years requires the state to re-negotiate terms of entry with limited credibility or coercive leverage. This exposes a public conversation about trust, legitimacy and how publics find it advantageous to engage with government.

Paper long abstract:

Benue State is a largely agrarian region, increasingly unable to survive on its share of Nigeria's oil wealth, and like many other states looking to domestic taxation to solve its financial difficulties. Reintroducing personal taxation after 30 years of neglect however requires the state to re-negotiate terms of entry where it possesses limited credibility or coercive leverage. This exposes a public conversation about trust, legitimacy and the ways in which publics find it advantageous to engage with government.

Debates around high taxes and governmental failures reveal that rural publics acknowledge the right of government to tax at the same time as experiencing its very evident material shortcomings, which force communities to rely on self-help social services. Yet, while taxation literature suggests that publics only slowly realise the material benefits of taxation by learning to bargain for greater access to services, fieldwork reveals that communities may welcome tax registration as a promise of modernity and a sign of the state noticing their existence. Formalisation is thus an instalment in trust and a statement of hope for future statebuilding.

Beyond that, however, popular understandings of government's right to tax, and of taxpayers' rights, are built on historical foundations which saw tax payment constitutive of social status, adulthood and gender, thus serving purposes beyond the material. This cultural memory of taxation both acknowledges coercive government and appropriates it for purposes of voice and self-validation. Thus, this study highlights how (re)formalisation processes involve not just negotiating material relationships, but also reconstituting the public sphere.