By Julian Pecquet, in Washington
Nigeria led the call to give the world body a say on taxing multinational corporations.

African countries scored a historic win for international tax reform this week, paving the way for the United Nations to start seizing power from rich nations on an issue that has long frustrated developing nations.
With tax authorities around the world collecting little to nothing on trillions of dollars in multinational corporate profits, the UN’s Africa bloc, led by Nigeria on 22 November, pushed a resolution calling for a new UN tax convention. Developing countries carried the day in a lopsided vote, with 125 nations voting in favour – including China and Russia along with 51 of the 54 UN’s African member states (Mauritius, Somalia and São Tomé and Príncipe did not vote).
“The decades’ long fight of Global South countries to establish a fully inclusive process at the United Nations to participate in agenda setting and norm-setting on international tax is now a reality,” the African Union said in a statement after the vote. “We look forward to building on this spirit of cooperation and agreeing on an effective UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation to urgently mobilise resources for our development.”
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Voting against the measure were 48 mostly developed countries, including the US and the UK as well as every member of the European Union along with Australia, New Zealand Canada, Japan and South Korea. They say they’re committed to fair taxation while arguing that the UN push is needlessly divisive.

“Unfortunately,” said the US representative at the vote, “the process outlined in this resolution will undermine rather than strengthen existing efforts to improve the international tax system through international tax cooperation.”
Stalled progress
But critics aren’t buying it. Advocates for tax reform say the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based club of 38 mostly rich democracies, has failed to make much progress on the issue despite having the most financial means and technical expertise.
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“A lot of OECD members frame their remarks in terms of their commitment to development, to international tax cooperation,” says Alex Cobham, an economist and chief executive of the Tax Justice Network in London. “It rings pretty hollow.”
Since the UN in 2015 adopted, for the first time, a global target to curb corporate tax abuse and other illicit financial flows, Cobham tells The Africa Report, “nothing has been done that you can point to as a success in terms of international tax cooperation.”
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Others disagree. Richard Murphy, a professor of accounting who heads Tax Research UK, points to the OECD’s success in establishing rules governing the exchange of tax information between jurisdictions.
“The UN could not, I very strongly suspect, have delivered anything better,” Murphy told The Guardian. “To pretend otherwise is absurd, and does no one any credit.”
Regardless, many developing countries have concluded that the club of rich countries is “both exclusionary and ineffective,” Cobham says.
The OECD itself in a new report found that more than a third of global net profits worth $6.5trn were being taxed at rates below 15%, with most tax avoidance taking place in rich countries with much higher tax rates.
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Frustrated with the lack of progress, the African bloc at the UN last year led a resolution, adopted by consensus, asking Secretary-General António Guterres to report on ways to improve the “inclusiveness and effectiveness” of international tax cooperation. This summer, the UN chief concluded that “enhancing the UN’s role in setting and shaping global tax rules appears the most viable path for making international tax cooperation fully inclusive and more effective.”
Nigeria’s envoy to the UN, Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, called this week’s vote a “beacon of hope” for developing nations that “paves the way for accessing critical resources, crucial for responding to current crises and advancing towards sustainable development.”
“This resolution is not just a policy document,” he said ahead of the vote. “It is a testament to our collective resolve for a fairer, more resilient global economy.”
Getting on board
Developed countries have warned against undermining the OECD, pointing out that it is best equipped to advance the tax reform agenda.
But Cobham says rich nations will have little choice but to get on board if they don’t want to lose out on tax revenues while the rest of the world strengthens its own rules.
“There will be a fight over the budget for this,” Cobham tells The Africa Report. “But the creation of a convention will bring with it a secretariat and over time a standing budget that will allow some fraction of the huge resources the OECD gets for the tax to go to the UN.”
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Summarising the African perspective, Nigeria’s Muhammad-Bande called the resolution a “blueprint” for a “more equitable” future for all nations.
“By standing together today,” he said, “we commit not only to a fairer tax system, but also to a collective future where economic justice and sustainability are not mere aspirations, but achievable realities.”