…Says Nigerians need lower living costs,

Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has challenged the administration of President Bola Tinubu to explain what he described as contradictions in its claims that more than N600 billion has been disbursed to “slightly over 10 million households” under its cash transfer programme.

Atiku, in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, said the figures raised questions about the administration’s handling of the programme and called for greater transparency and accountability.

According to him, the Presidency stated on July 16, 2026, that expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households and repeated essentially the same figure on August 2. He noted, however, that the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs said on August 26 that the programme had reached only “slightly over 10 million households.”

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

He also questioned the government’s expenditure figures, noting that if qualifying households received N25,000 monthly for three months, the full payment would amount to N75,000 per household.

“If 10 million households received the full payment, that would be about N750 billion. If 15 million households did, it would exceed N1.1 trillion. Yet government says it spent just over N600 billion,” he said.

Atiku therefore asked the government to clarify how many beneficiaries received one, two or all three tranches, how many payments failed or were reversed, and whether names on the social register were being counted as evidence of actual payments.

“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.

Beyond the figures, Atiku criticised the administration’s economic policies, arguing that the growing number of households requiring cash assistance was evidence of deepening economic hardship.

“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. 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,” he said.

He added: “That is not prosperity. It is the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor.”
Atiku said this was why he was proposing a targeted, capped and transparent intervention in the domestic petroleum value chain, which he said was 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,” he said.

He argued that the approach differed from relying primarily on cash transfers after households had already been pushed into economic hardship.

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

Atiku called on the government to provide a verifiable audit trail if the N600 billion had indeed been disbursed.

“If N600 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,” he said.

He added that the Tinubu administration should not demand scrutiny of his proposed intervention while asking Nigerians to accept its own spending figures without verifiable evidence.

“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?” he said.