A former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has challenged the Tinubu administration to explain the glaring contradictions surrounding its claim that more than ₦600 billion has been disbursed to “slightly over 10 million households” under its cash-transfer programme.

Mr Abubakar, in a statement issued by his senior special assistant on public communication, Phrank Shaibu, said the figures expose an administration increasingly defined by government-by-press-release, arithmetic by convenience and accountability by imagination.

“On 16 July 2026, the presidency officially declared that expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households. It repeated essentially the same figure on 2 August 2026. Yet on 26 August 2026, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs suddenly told Nigerians that only ‘slightly over 10 million households’ had been reached.

“So where did five million households go? These are not opposition figures. They are Tinubu’s figures contradicting Tinubu’s figures.

“The arithmetic is even more troubling. Nigerians were told qualifying households would receive ₦25,000 monthly for three months — ₦75,000 per household. If 10 million households received the full payment, that would be about ₦750 billion. If 15 million households did, it would exceed ₦1.1 trillion. Yet government says it spent just over ₦600 billion.

“So how many received one tranche, two tranches or all three? How many payments failed or were reversed? How many names were merely lifted from an existing social register and presented as evidence of actual payment?

“A name on a social register is not a bank alert. Counting people in a database is not the same thing as proving money reached them.

“But beyond the arithmetic lies a bigger indictment. A government boasting that tens of millions of households require emergency cash transfers should not be congratulating itself. It should be explaining why its economic policies pushed so many people into desperation.

“Tinubu has turned poverty into a government programme: make fuel expensive, transport rises; transport rises, food rises; food rises, medicine expensive, the family basket shrinks. Businesses face higher energy and logistics costs, workers lose purchasing power, and when millions become poorer, government registers them as ‘vulnerable,’ gives some of them cash and calls it reform.

“That is not prosperity. It is the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor.

“This is precisely why Atiku proposes a targeted, capped and transparent intervention in the domestic petroleum value chain.  It is designed to reduce fuel and transportation costs at source.

“When petrol becomes cheaper, the bus driver spends less, the farmer moves produce more cheaply, the trader pays less for haulage, businesses face lower logistics costs and the savings travel through the economy to the family kitchen.

“That is the difference. Tinubu waits until poverty enters the home and arrives with a cash-transfer form. Atiku wants to reduce the cost pressures that drove the family into poverty in the first place.

“A serious anti-poverty policy should reduce the number of people needing palliatives, not celebrate how many millions have become vulnerable.

“If ₦600 billion truly moved, then government must show the trail: unique verified households, payment tranches, state-by-state distribution, failed transactions, reversals and an independent audit.

“The same government that demands every kobo of Atiku’s proposed intervention cannot ask Nigerians to accept its own hundreds of billions on faith. That is not accountability. It is hypocrisy armed with a calculator.

“Until the Tinubu administration reconciles these figures and produces a verifiable payment trail, Nigerians are entitled to keep asking: where did the five million households disappear to? Did they graduate from poverty, vanish from the social register, or simply disappear because government propaganda ran ahead of the truth?”

Phrank Shaibu

Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication to Atiku Abubakar, Vice President of Nigeria (1999–2007) and Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress

27 August 2026