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It's a hard deadline. No extensions.

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TOGETHER WITH CREDIT DIRECT

So you’re a freelancer. The government has noticed.

Creators, consultants, and independents - the new tax laws affect how you earn, how you file, and how much you keep. Also, with the March 31 closer than it feels, this is the conversation you need to be having right now.

Watch the detailed breakdown between our Head of Finance and Strategy, Dr Emeka Ucheaga, and Abiodun Kayode-Alli, Senior Tax Consultant at PwC.

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You have three months to subscribe

Notadeepdive covers Nigerian technology and business for some 5,000 subscribers. Some of you have been kind enough to say this newsletter deserves something like 10,000 instead. I agree.

So I’m setting a hard deadline of June 13, 2026 — three months from today — for Notadeepdive to hit 10k subscribers. If we do not get there, I will shut down the newsletter permanently. No extensions.

I’m kidding. Obviously.

But I bet your first instinct was probably: he’s not serious, that deadline will move, let me keep scrolling.

And if you felt a flash of alarm at the thought of this newsletter shutting down permanently, send me money it might have been followed by my strong-arming you. While the goal is reasonable and the timeline is ambitious, the real problem is that the consequences fall entirely on you, the audience, rather than me, who failed to plan.

If it sounds all too familiar, you’re likely a traumatised Nigerian.

On October 26, 2022, Nigeria’s Central Bank announced that old ₦200, ₦500, and ₦1,000 notes would stop being legal tender on January 31, 2023. Therefore, Nigerians had three months to swap old notes for new ones. The timeline was unrealistic and more than a few reasonable people said so, but the CBN held its ground.

The cash shortage that followed triggered protests across multiple states, severe disruption to daily commerce, and widespread hardship. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled the deadline was unconstitutional; old and new notes ended up circulating side by side.

It will go down in history as cruel enforcement, when humanity and common sense could have delivered better results.

Last week, we saw another example that shows Nigeria’s institutions learn nothing from policy execution failures. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria had been discussing the elimination of cash payments at airports since at least mid-2025, when its managing director outlined an automation strategy for airport revenue collection.

By September, FAAN had partnered with Paystack to pilot contactless payments at Lagos and Abuja airports. In November 2025, the Accountant General of the Federation issued a timeline for all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to stop accepting physical cash for government revenue.

Fast forward to February 27, 2026, and FAAN confirmed that the cashless system would be fully enforced across all airports from March 1, meaning the last public push came only days before full enforcement. From that date, every motorist entering an airport would need a prepaid FAAN card, an e-tag, or a bank card to get through the toll gate. No card, no entry. Cash, which is how the overwhelming majority of drivers had paid the ₦500-to-₦1,000 access fee for decades, would no longer be accepted.

You’re welcome to guess how that played out.

In 2020, the deadline to link SIM cards to National Identification Number (NIN) was repeatedly extended for years as the NCC discovered that tens of millions of subscribers hadn’t complied. Bank Verification Number enrollment deadlines drifted from 2014 onward.

In every case, the arc is the same: hard deadline, mass unpreparedness, chaos or extension, then a reversion to a phased approach that should have been used from the start. FAAN’s March 1 enforcement only added another data point to the pattern.

After years of deadlines, reversals, and extensions, government deadlines in Nigeria have lost their power to shock. The rational response for many Nigerians is to treat a government deadline as a negotiating position.

When FAAN set a March 1 deadline, many motorists didn’t prepare because experience told them the date would shift. When it didn’t, the system buckled under the weight of people who had rationally concluded, based on precedent, that the government was bluffing.

By March 4, President Tinubu suspended the policy at a Federal Executive Council meeting, with the aviation minister explaining that the President acted “out of empathy.” A day later, FAAN officials had vacated the toll gates, and vehicles were driving through without paying.

A hybrid system has now gone live with cash and cards accepted, a phased arrangement that should have been done from the start. To be fair, FAAN’s spokesperson said the original plan was a phased rollout, but the AGF’s circular gave agencies 45 days to deploy electronic alternatives. A government-wide rule, designed for hundreds of agencies with wildly different operating realities, was applied without any translation layer or nuance, and of course, we found ourselves where we always find ourselves.

I’ll now be taking new subscribers while continuing to write the newsletter.

See you on Sunday!

Oh, wait! I worked on this 2025 Impact Report for CcHUB and I’d love for you to read it!