Nojeem ‘Nudge’ Yusuf

To whom it may concern: I am a ‘very’ Ijebu man. Rest the DMs.

Too many takes on last night’s Ballon d’Or awards in Linkedlish. Enjoy the awards, celebrate the winners, then do your work today. You and I know you didn’t learn a thing about ‘stakeholder management’ from last night and that’s okay. 😊

How tax planning and tax policy work. Once upon a time, salary was the main way to pay people. Bonuses and non-cash benefits were rare. So the law taxed just salary. Then one employer thought: I’ll pay a small salary and a fat bonus. That means less tax, happier staff. Just one employer, so the government didn’t notice. A few years on, everyone copied it. Tax collected dropped. So the taxman changed the law: any cash paid to an employee is taxable, whatever you call it. Then another employer thought: forget cash. Give them a car, a house, free lunch. The tax was on cash, so non-cash was protected. Everyone copied that too. The taxman closed that gap as well. That’s why almost every benefit is taxable today. Except the ones too impractical to chase. Simple principle: someone finds a loophole, everyone follows, then the law catches up. PS: This story is merely Illustrative. It doesn’t describe any specific country or real events.

General Oladipupo Diya

As a tax adviser, when you prepare tax returns for your clients, some of them will likely pass them through an AI tool to find savings and errors. That’s why you shouldn’t wait for them to do it first. But as you do so, don’t expose your clients’ data to hawks.

Even in the clap back, the Honourable Minister stayed respectful. He could have said ‘Awọn ara ile RẸ ni nigga’. Instead of the regular singular pronoun, he chose the honorific pronoun, and that’s why he said: ‘Awọn ara ile YIN ni nigga’. Manners kept intact. What a man.

Sorry, but I can’t unsee KMPG. Yes, I’m that petty. 😅

The more you look, the less you see. 😅

As a man why were you hoping that Leeds would beat Arsenal? You Joker 😅😅😅

That’s normally a taxable benefit to the teachers. And that’s because the shares would be gifted by their employer. The tax law allows the governor to waive the tax that would have been donning

Using AI to preach against AI. But thinking you can use it smartly than others, and hoping people won’t find out. It’s okay to use AI, responsibly. Just own it. No need to be smarter-than-thou.

33% annual ‘rent’ on Islamic mortgage. Such an Inna liLLAH situation.

Am I the only one here that knows about ‘As a man’? 😃

To many people, worship is a private affair between you and God. In Islam, that’s not always the case. For certain aspects of worship, the default position is to observe them publicly. That’s why we make the call to prayer publicly. In Ramadan, we don’t just fast, we start and end the month as a community. Friday prayers, Eid prayers and Hajj are public gatherings; we don’t do them in the corner of our rooms. These and many more are the visible marks of the religion. In Suratul-Hajj, whoever honours the ‘symbols of Allah’ is from the piety of hearts. The wisdom is obvious. If certain acts of worship weren’t legislated as public rites, the faith would have died quietly, except in books. Many children and even adults learnt how to perform these acts because they saw others doing them not because someone sat them down to teach them. Sometimes your faith gets weaker and what keeps you going is the encouragement you get from seeing others show up. And I hope no one gets it twisted, thinking that public worship is showing off because it is not. When adult males pray in the mosque, they do so because the Sharia calls them to do it — that’s piety, not showing off. It becomes showing off when the intention is to be admired by others. Of course, there is a place for private acts of worship. In Surah Ibraheem, Allah tells the believers to pray and spend ‘secretly and openly’. Scholars have explained that obligatory acts like Zakat, the 5 daily prayers are done openly while the voluntary ones are best kept private. In Islam, we don’t become pious by keeping everything private, we do by observing some of them publicly and that keeps the faith alive. May Allah accept our acts of worship and grant us Jannah.

In one email to me, someone murdered the names of 3 firms I had worked with KMPG, Delloite and PWC. Not impressed at all. 😊

Nigeria may be the hardest place in the world to own a home. The average price of a livable house could be around N100m. Yes, much cheaper ones exist. But I mean a real house not just a roof over your head. Average income could be around N1.2m. That’s 83x. If the average person saves all their income, it could take 83 years to own their house. As a couple who save 40% to own a house, that’s more than 100 years. Even for a heavily subsidised 3 bedroom flat sold at N10m, that’s still more than 8x the average income. And when I compared to other African countries, I didn’t find any with a worse outcome. Even countries like Ghana and Cameroun have it much less difficult than ours. Mortgage alone can’t fix this problem. No one is going to lend at scale to a people living in the poverty capital of the world. P.S: Average in this tweet means median.

Has anyone seen a modern courtyard house in Nigeria? I mean a house built around open air space in the middle. I’m told our ancestors lived like this. Is anyone keeping the legacy?

I don’t say « ain’t ». Broke my rule once; to hype Gyökeres. Now, see what he’s done to me. Never again.

Like I said below, Nigeria’s current maternity pay model quietly discourages employers from hiring women of childbearing age. Last night I sent a proposal to the Ministry of Finance to fix this. To goal isn’t to compensate every woman who has a baby. It’s to ensure women aren’t financially worse off for taking a few months to give birth. Not a silver bullet. Only things I believe are implementable now or soon. These things take time to get right.