By Omeiza Ajayi ABUJA: Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC, Atiku Abubakar, has questioned the arithmetic behind the President 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 […] The post Your N600bn cash-transfer arithmetic doesn’t add up, Atiku tells Tinubu appeared first on Vanguard News .
By Omeiza Ajayi
ABUJA: Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC, Atiku Abubakar, has questioned the arithmetic behind the President 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 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 payment, that would total about N750 billion, while 15 million households receiving the full payment would exceed N1.1 trillion — yet government says it spent just over N600 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,” he said.
The former vice president tied the disputed arithmetic to what he described as a shifting household count.
According to the statement, the Presidency officially declared on July 16, 2026, that expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households, and repeated essentially the same figure on August 2, 2026. Yet on August 26, 2026, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs 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,” Atiku said, describing the discrepancy as evidence of an administration increasingly defined by government-by-press-release, arithmetic by convenience and accountability by imagination.
Atiku argued that a government boasting that tens of millions of households require emergency cash transfers should not be congratulating itself, but explaining why its economic policies pushed so many people into desperation.
He accused the administration of turning poverty into a government programme, arguing that expensive fuel raises transport costs, which in turn raises food and medicine costs and shrinks the family basket, while businesses face higher energy and logistics costs and workers lose purchasing power. “That is not prosperity. It is the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor,” he said.
Atiku said this was why he had proposed a targeted, capped and transparent intervention in the domestic petroleum value chain, 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,” the statement said.
He insisted that a serious anti-poverty policy should reduce the number of people needing palliatives, not celebrate how many millions have become vulnerable, and called on the government to produce a full payment trail if it truly disbursed N600 billion — including 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,” he said.
Atiku maintained that until the Tinubu administration reconciles the figures and produces a verifiable payment trail, Nigerians are entitled to keep asking where the five million households disappeared to. “Did they graduate from poverty, vanish from the social register, or simply disappear because government propaganda ran ahead of the truth?” he asked.
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