It’s deja vu in Africa. It started with Kenya, the people groaning under “big government” crying for relief. Instead, what did President William Ruto do? He attempted to pass a new finance bill—egged on by the “opinion of young men” like the International Monetary Fund—to increase taxes on the people. This included taxes and levies on bread, transportation, and even sanitary pads, according to BBC Africa. The reasoning behind it was to reduce the country’s debt burden. What was the end result? The exact same thing that happened in the passage above—people rose up to oppose the president; this time violently.

Not to be outshone by Kenya, the Nigerian federal government is in the process of passing its own tax increases under a set of tax reform bills. And, just like the young advisers in the passage, the government has its own “young men”—a presidential committee headed up by a tax veteran of more than two decades.

The tax reform bills are four in number, which are meant to cover a new formula for sharing value-added tax (VAT) among the federal and state governments, the creation of a centralized tax collection agency, and the plan to use technology to monitor the bank accounts of all citizens of the country to try and prevent any leaks in taxes. The rationale behind this tax increase is to generate more money for capital expenditure by the government, eliminate multiple taxations by different government agencies/sub-national governments, and drastically reduce government money printing. It was really nice to hear the government tax czar openly admit that government money printing to cover deficit spending causes price inflation. You would never hear that from the central bank or most mainstream economists in the country.