Mr. Muhammad Nami, immediate past Executive Chairman of Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has been named as The Top10 Magazine Man of the Year 2023.
He emerged the stand-out choice among many other distinguished personalities in a multi-stage rigorous selection and screening process.
In a letter conveying Mr. Nami’s emergence as Man of the Year 2023, the Board of Editors of The Top10 Magazine said the selection is in recognition of the numerous records set by him and other accomplishments recorded by FIRS during his leadership as the Executive Chairman of the Service between January 2020- September 2023.
The publication said in the letter to Mr. Nami: “Your milestone accomplishments, especially the records broken and new records set by FIRS under your leadership is a clear demonstration of your competence as a change agent in the administration of the Nigerian tax system, which is worthy of commendation, hence the decision of our management to accord you this special recognition as The Top10 Magazine Man of the Year 2023.”
The Top10 Magazine is a monthly publication established eight years ago as a platform to celebrate excellence and people of excellence from all human endeavours. The Top10 Man of the Year award was instituted same year as an annual award by the magazine to recognize and honour one outstanding personality in a given year that has recorded landmark accomplishments in the Nigerian society.
This year’s recepient, Mr. Nami, a tax administation leader, shattered many tax collection records at FIRS when he was in charge as the agency’s Executive Chairman. Deploying a tax reform programme built on a four-pronged approach of stakeholder relations, customer centricity, data & technology and institutional restructuring, Nami spurred an astronomical rise in non-oil revenues in the three years following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
In 2021, FIRS overshoot its N6.401trillion target to N6.405. The following year, 2022, FIRS surpassed the N10 trillion mark by contributing N10.1 trillion in tax revenues in a single year; and the highest ever recorded in Nigerian history.
But the best is still unraveling: the agency collected N5.5 trillion total tax revenue between January and June this year, an amount higher than the N4.95trillion it collected in the entire 2020 fiscal year and about N900 billion less than the N6.4 trillion collected in all of 2021. It is the highest ever tax collection by the service for the first six months of a fiscal year.
Mr. Tony Iji, Publisher/Editor-In-Chief of The Top10 Magazine, has hinted that ahead of the official presentation of the award to Mr. Nami, the magazine was putting together a special award edition to celebrate him. The edition will chronicle in details all the records set by him and other milestone accomplishments recorded by FIRS under his leadership, the agency’s contributions to the economy as well as his career and personal antecedents.
The final stage of the celebration will be the official Man of the Year investiture ceremony where the award will be presented to Mr. Nami at The Top10 Magazine Excellence Awards night slated for later in the year, which will be graced by crème de la crème of the society.
