Douglas Kendyson, founder and chief executive of Selar, used a public thread on X to accuse the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service of pursuing his company for a backdated 5% tax on its sale
Douglas Kendyson, founder and chief executive of Selar, used a public thread on X to accuse the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service of pursuing his company for a backdated 5% tax on its sales, which LIRS has classified as royalty income.
Kendyson addressed the thread directly to Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and federal Minister of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy Hannatu Musawa, tagging LIRS’s own account, and argued that Selar’s revenue comes from a transaction commission rather than any licensing of intellectual property.
selar Neither Kendyson nor LIRS responded to questions from Technext about the dispute by the time of publication. Kendyson said in response to an interview request that Selar was “not up for speaking to the press about this yet” and would reach out if that changed, and LIRS did not respond to a written request for comment sent to its corporate communications desk.
Selar has spent nine years building a niche that founder Kendyson describes as helping African creators sell digital products such as ebooks and online courses, and the company’s own disclosures give a clear picture of its scale.
Selar paid out 9.88 billion naira to creators across Africa in 2024, up from roughly 4 billion naira the year before, and a report says the figure climbed further to over 18 billion naira in 2025, spread across five years. The company’s user base grew alongside those payouts, from about 880,000 in 2023 to 1.5 million by the end of 2024, and Intelpoint’s review of Selar’s growth put its active creator count at roughly 400,000 by 2024, consistent with the figures Kendyson cited in his thread.
Selar has described its revenue model publicly in past interviews as resting on three legs:
A commission of around 4% on each product sold, a software-as-a-service subscription tier, and a foreign exchange spread on cross-border payouts, which complicates a framing of the dispute as purely about a single commission line.
The specific tax classification at the centre of the disagreement turns on language that Nigeria’s tax authorities have only recently tightened. The Nigeria Tax Act, 2025, which took effect on January 1, 2026, introduced for the first time a formal statutory definition of royalty income, describing it broadly as payment for the right to use intellectual property such as software, trademarks, or licensed content.
Whether a platform commission on facilitating a sale of someone else’s digital product falls inside or outside that definition is a genuine point of legal interpretation rather than a settled question, and it is the kind of dispute that tax advisers say is becoming more common as Nigeria’s revenue authorities expand their reach into platform and digital-economy income following the 2025 reforms.
A separate, more basic question about jurisdiction is worth noting for readers trying to follow the dispute. LIRS’s own public guidance describes its mandate as covering personal income tax, state-level withholding tax, and hotel occupancy tax, while company income tax and value-added tax fall under the federal Nigeria Revenue Service rather than a state revenue authority.
That distinction matters here because it is not yet clear from Kendyson’s public statement whether LIRS is treating the disputed 5% as a tax on Selar’s own commission income, which would ordinarily be a federal company income tax matter, or as a withholding tax obligation on the payouts Selar makes to individual creators, which would sit more clearly within LIRS’s state-level remit. Kendyson’s thread does not specify which, and neither side has clarified the point on the record.
The dispute also lands awkwardly against LIRS’s own recent public messaging toward the tech sector.
LIRS chairman Ayodele Zubair told a FintechNGR industry webinar earlier this year that the agency sees fintech and tech companies as partners rather than adversaries in Nigeria’s tax modernisation drive, pointing to tools such as administrative review, alternative dispute resolution, and a tax ombudsman that the 2025 reforms introduced specifically to handle disagreements like this one without a public standoff.
