Oyedele diagnosed what was wrong with Nigerian tax. Now he owns the cure.

Taiwo Oyedele spent two years inside Tinubu's Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms doing something rare in Nigerian public life: explaining precisely what was broken and designing a specific fix for it.

Tinubu nominated him Minister of State for Finance yesterday, putting him in charge of executing what he designed.

His committee produced four laws that took effect January 1: a Nigeria Tax Bill, a Tax Administration Bill, a Nigeria Revenue Service establishment bill, and a Joint Revenue Board bill. They exempt anyone earning under N800,000 annually from income tax. They protect small businesses with turnover below N50 million from company income tax. They consolidate over 60 levy-collecting agencies into one revenue service.

The diagnosis was right. The laws are serious. The question was always implementation.

Because the 60 agencies being consolidated don't dissolve because a law says so. Their staff still exist. Their offices still exist. Their incentives to keep collecting still exist. The officials who built careers on the old system are still inside the machine Oyedele now has to change from within.

As committee chairman he owned the design. If implementation failed, the gap was between his blueprint and someone else's execution. That distance is gone now. Every small business owner who files a compliant return and still gets harassed by a revenue officer, that's his ministry. Every agency that keeps collecting after it was supposed to be consolidated, that's his brief.

He diagnosed the disease. He designed the cure. Now he has to make the patient take the medicine. That's the hardest part of Nigerian reform. It has always been the hardest part.

The Senate still needs to confirm him. Watch how long that takes.