Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has challenged President Bola Tinubu’s government to reconcile conflicting figures on the number of households reached under its expanded cash-transfer programme. He recently had his say via a press statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu.
According to Atiku, the contradiction between the government’s earlier claim that 15m vulnerable households had been reached and a more recent figure of slightly over 10m households raises serious questions about the programme’s implementation and the government’s management of public funds.
The African Democratic Congress presidential candidate added that the Federal Government must explain what happened to the five million households missing from the latest figure.
It read, “On July 16, 2026, the presidency officially declared that expanded cash transfers had reached 15m vulnerable households.
It repeated essentially the same figure on August 2, 2026. Yet on August 26, 2026, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs suddenly told Nigerians that only ‘slightly over 10m 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.
If ₦600bn truly moved, then government must show the trail: unique verified households, payment tranches, state-by-state distribution, failed transactions, reversals and an independent audit.
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 becomes expensive; the family basket shrinks.
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.
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.
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?”
Visit NaijaVibe HoT 100 Songs