Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has questioned the arithmetic behind the Bola Tinubu administration’s claim that more than N600 billion has been disbursed in cash transfers to vulnerable households, saying the figures do not reconcile with the government’s own stated payment structure.
Atiku, in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, on Thursday in Abuja, said Nigerians were told that qualifying households would receive N25,000 monthly for three months, amounting to N75,000 per household.
He noted that if 10 million households received the full three payments, the total would amount to N750 billion. If 15 million households received the full payment, the figure would exceed N1.1 trillion.
“Yet the government says it has spent just over N600 billion,” Atiku said.
He questioned how many households actually received one tranche, two tranches, or all three tranches, and demanded clarification on failed or reversed transactions.
“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,” he said.
The former vice president also drew attention to what he described as a contradiction in the government’s reported number of beneficiary households.
According to the statement, the Presidency announced on July 16, 2026, that expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households. The same figure was essentially repeated on August 2.
However, on August 26, 2026, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs reportedly told Nigerians that only slightly more than 10 million households had been reached.
“So where did five million households go?” Atiku asked.
“These are not opposition figures. They are Tinubu’s figures contradicting Tinubu’s figures.”
He described the discrepancy as evidence of what he called an administration increasingly defined by “government-by-press-release, arithmetic by convenience and accountability by imagination.”
Atiku further argued that the government should not be celebrating the number of Nigerians requiring emergency cash assistance, but should instead explain why its economic policies had pushed so many households into financial distress.
He accused the administration of turning poverty into a government programme, arguing that higher fuel costs increase transportation expenses, which subsequently raise the cost of food, medicine and other essentials while reducing household purchasing power.
He added that businesses are simultaneously facing higher energy and logistics costs, making it more difficult for them to operate, invest and retain purchasing power for workers.
“That is not prosperity. It is the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor,” Atiku said.
The ADC presidential candidate said this was why he had proposed a targeted, capped and transparent intervention in the domestic petroleum value chain aimed at reducing 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,” the statement said.
“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.”
Atiku maintained that a serious anti-poverty policy should ultimately reduce the number of people who need government palliatives rather than celebrate how many millions have become dependent on them.
He therefore called on the Tinubu administration to publish a complete and independently verifiable payment trail if it truly disbursed more than N600 billion.
According to him, such a record should include the number of unique and verified beneficiary households, the number of payment tranches received by each category of beneficiaries, state-by-state distributions, failed transactions, reversals and an independent audit of the programme.
“The same government that demands every kobo of Atiku’s proposed intervention cannot ask Nigerians to accept its own hundreds of billions on faith,” he said.
“That is not accountability. It is hypocrisy armed with a calculator.”
Atiku insisted that until the Tinubu administration reconciles the figures and produces a verifiable payment trail, Nigerians are justified in continuing to ask what happened to the five million households that appear to have disappeared from the government’s reported figures.
“Did they graduate from poverty, vanish from the social register, or simply disappear because government propaganda ran ahead of the truth?” he asked.
Atiku to Tinubu: Your N600bn Cash-Transfer Arithmetic Doesn’t Add Up
