Former Vice President and African Democratic Congress (ADC) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has demanded an independent audit of the Federal Government’s cash-transfer programme, questioning the discrepancy between its reported number of beneficiaries and the amount allegedly disbursed.
Atiku said the Tinubu administration must explain the whereabouts of about five million households after the government’s reported beneficiary figure dropped from 15 million to slightly above 10 million within weeks.
He made the demand in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu.
The former vice president said the Presidency had announced on July 16 that expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households and repeated a similar figure on August 2.
However, he said the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, on August 26, reported that the programme had reached only “slightly over 10 million households”.
Atiku described the conflicting figures as evidence of a lack of transparency in the administration’s management of the scheme.
“So where did five million households go? These are not opposition figures. They are Tinubu’s figures contradicting Tinubu’s figures,” he said.
He also raised questions about the N600 billion reportedly spent under the programme.
According to Atiku, beneficiaries were expected to receive N25,000 monthly for three months, meaning that a beneficiary household that received all three payments would get N75,000.
He noted that if 10 million households had received the full three-month payment, the total would be about N750 billion, while 15 million households would require more than N1.1 trillion.
Atiku therefore asked the government to clarify how many households received one, two or three instalments and provide information on failed, reversed or otherwise incomplete transactions.
He also questioned whether the number of households being cited by government represented actual beneficiaries or merely people listed on an existing social register.
“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.
Atiku said the controversy went beyond discrepancies in figures, arguing that the scale of the cash-transfer programme reflected the depth of economic hardship in the country.
He accused the Tinubu administration of adopting policies that had increased the cost of fuel, transportation, food, medicine, energy and business operations, thereby reducing household purchasing power.
He described the approach as “the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor”.
The ADC candidate said his proposed alternative would focus on reducing the underlying cost pressures responsible for worsening household hardship rather than relying primarily on cash transfers after people had become vulnerable.
He reiterated his proposal for a targeted and transparent intervention in the domestic petroleum value chain, which he said would help lower fuel and transportation costs.
According to him, cheaper petrol would reduce transport and logistics expenses for farmers, traders, businesses and other economic operators, with the resulting savings eventually reaching consumers.
“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,” he said.
He called on the Federal Government to publish details of the cash-transfer disbursements, including verified beneficiary records, payment tranches, state-by-state allocations, failed transactions and reversals.
Atiku said an independent audit would help establish whether the N600 billion claimed by the government actually reached intended beneficiaries.
He added that the administration could not demand transparency over his proposed intervention while asking Nigerians to accept its own expenditure without verifiable evidence.
Until the figures are reconciled and the payment trail made public, Atiku said Nigerians would continue to question what happened to the five million households missing from the government’s latest beneficiary figure.
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