FEMII

Hi @jidesanwoolu, @hanneymusawa I'm deeply disappointed in your @lirs_govng team hounding Selar in the name of claiming creator royalty taxes. I turn 30 in Oct and I've spent the last 10 years building Selar, so this is what the youth mean by policies being created to crush growing businesses. We are the pioneering and largest creator company in Nigeria (Africa actually), and instead of being supported by the government, the LIRS team is keen on trying to scapegoat us to set a precident. Beyond the huge numbers seen in the headlines, we are still a young company just trying to make our mark for the creator economy in a country where we've never been supported once, we're literally a bootstrapped company. In 2025 alone, we've fulfilled our tax obligation in almost 9 figures and we've never missed out on any of our tax obligation over the years. You can check the records. We are a software company, we make our ecommerce software available to our thousands of creators in not just Nigeria but 13 other African countries and for that, we earn a small commission of 4%, most of which goes to our payment provider. This is the same business as shopify, teachable, e.t.c There is no reason LIRS is hounding us for a backdated 5% royalty fee on all sales when we've clearly explained our line of business to them and shared everything to prove we are not a royalty based business. What they're asking us to do is raise our pricing to extort these funds from our creators which is odd considering our creators still pay taxes on their income. No creator company in the world charges as high as even 5%. Also, less payment gateway charges we get 1-3% max, so where do we pay backdated 5% fees from? The government would have to decide if it wants the Nigerian creative economy to grow or not. This conversation is important to me because we pioneered this industry of monetizing digital products online in Nigeria and today we host over 400k creators selling using our platform. This is an opportunity for the government to show it's committment to making Nigeria work for young Nigerians especially in the creator economy. Time and money we should be spending investing into our business and it's growth for the GDP of this nation is being spent in long back and forth. We can't catch up with the west if this is what we're facing at home. Above everything else, disputes like this are distracting from the real work. If anything, for all our CSR contributions to the education system in the country with our Smart Hustle Anti fraud initiative and our other efforts, we should be getting tax rebates, but we're not even asking for anything but to be left alone to build our business. Thank you.