Kaduna IGR trends towards ₦120bn as KADIRS credits reforms

• Outgoing revenue chief Jerry Adams says monthly collections have risen to about ₦10bn from an average of ₦7bn in 2025.

Kaduna State’s internally generated revenue (IGR) is trending towards ₦120 billion annually, with average monthly collections now reaching about ₦10 billion, the outgoing Executive Chairman of the Kaduna State Internal Revenue Service (KADIRS), Jerry Adams, has said.

Adams disclosed this on Thursday while speaking at the 160th meeting of the Joint Revenue Board in Kaduna.

He said the state’s IGR stood at ₦58 billion before 2023, rose to ₦62 billion in 2023 and reached ₦71 billion in 2024.

According to Adams, Kaduna generated ₦85 billion in 2025, with average monthly collections of about ₦7 billion.

He said the latest figures represented a sustained trend rather than a temporary spike, attributing the improvement to deeper collaboration with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), stakeholders and the state government.

Adams said Governor Uba Sani had provided the political backing that enabled KADIRS to increase revenue without interfering with its operations.

He contrasted the current performance with the period between 2019 and 2023, when he said the highest annual collection was N59 billion in 2022, averaging about ₦4.8 billion monthly.

“On paper, that looked like progress. But if you looked closer, as we eventually did, you’d find out that a significant portion of that revenue didn’t come from organic tax growth,” Adams said.

“It came from back duty recoveries, sale of government properties and some other one-off recoveries, not a growing, breathing tax base.”

He said the agency subsequently shifted its strategy from increasing collections from existing taxpayers to expanding the overall tax base.

“We could no longer keep squeezing the same familiar taxpayers a little harder each year and call it strategy,” he said.

“We needed to grow horizontally, not just vertically; to expand the tax net itself, rather than simply tighten it around those already caught in it, and to stop relying on windfalls to flatter our numbers.”

Adams said KADIRS also embarked on full digitisation of its processes to reduce revenue leakages through the PAYKADUNA portal and Project C.R.A.F.T., described as Cross Sector Systems for Revenue Administration and Fiscal Transparency.

“This gave us, for the first time, a centralised payment system for all state revenue, closing gaps that informal, cash-based collection had long allowed to thrive,” he said.

The latest figures are broadly consistent with reports from the 160th Joint Revenue Board meeting, which put Kaduna’s 2025 IGR at ₦85 billion and its current trajectory at about ₦120 billion annually.