By Bosola Odunuga
There is a story we tell about tax compliance in Africa.
It goes like this: people do not pay because they do not want to. They distrust governments. They operate in cash to stay invisible. They pass wealth through informal channels because the formal system cannot touch them. The problem, in this telling, is fundamentally behavioural, a population that has opted out of the social contract.
I have spent years inside financial services and compliance systems, first in Nigeria, now in the UK. And I believe that story, while not entirely wrong, is mostly a distraction.
The deeper problem is not behaviour. It is data.
