treaty

Here is a mistake many Nigerians abroad make without knowing it. A woman in Manchester works hard, saves carefully, and sends ₦500,000 home every quarter, but she never checks whether Nigeria and the United Kingdom have a tax agreement covering her income. She ends up paying tax twice on the same money, once in the United Kingdom and again when questions arise back home, simply because she assumed nobody had already sorted this out between the two governments.

That agreement she should have checked for is a treaty. A treaty is a formal, written promise between two or more countries about how they will treat each other on a specific matter. It could be trade, it could be tax, it could be double taxation relief, it could be how many tonnes of cocoa Nigeria can sell into a partner country without extra charges. Once signed, it becomes a rulebook that businesses, workers, and even ordinary families operate under, whether they read it or not.

Nigeria has treaties with several countries to prevent double taxation, meaning income earned in one country is not taxed fully in both places. There are also trade treaties under bodies like the African Continental Free Trade Area, which affect the price of goods crossing Nigeria's borders. None of this feels personal until you are the one filling a tax form or clearing goods at the port and realising the rate you pay depends entirely on paperwork signed by diplomats years before you were born.

In the United Kingdom, treaties shaped how trade worked with the European Union, and when that relationship changed, prices on shelves changed too, from cheese to car parts. The lesson is the same everywhere: treaties are invisible until the day they touch your invoice, your payslip, or your remittance.

Treaties do not shout. They sit calmly in government archives, but they decide who pays what, who trades with whom, and on what terms, long before any individual transaction happens.