Candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in next year’s presidential election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, said President Bola Tinubu should explain to Nigerians why his economic policies are pushing so many people into poverty.
Atiku in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, also said the president should explain the contradictions in the figures given by his government as number of people who benefited from his government’s cash transfers.
The former vice president noted that the president claimed that more than ₦600 billion has been disbursed to “slightly over 10 million households” under his cash-transfer programme.
He also stated that the presidency had on July 16 this year, claimed that the expanded cash transfers had reached 15 million vulnerable households, and repeated the same figure on August 2.
“Yet on 26 August 2026, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs suddenly told Nigerians that only ‘slightly over 10 million households’ had been reached,” Atiku said.
The ADC candidate further noted that Nigerians were told by the administration that each household would receive ₦25,000 monthly for three months, which he said, amounted to ₦75,000 per household.
According to him, if 10 million households received the full payment, the total figure would be about ₦750 billion, and would exceed ₦1.1 trillion if 15 million households are beneficiaries.
“Yet government says it spent just over ₦600 billion,” Atiku said, and reminded the All Progressives Congress (APC) led Federal Government that “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.”
Atiku said Tinubu should stop boasting that tens of millions of households require emergency cash transfers, and accused him of turning poverty into a government programme.
According to him, high cost of energy and logistics, and registering people pushed into poverty by government policies, as ‘vulnerable,’ to give cash are not prosperity.
“It is the industrial production of poverty followed by the bureaucratic management of the poor,” Atiku said.
The ADC candidate said he is proposing “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.
“A serious anti-poverty policy should reduce the number of people needing palliatives, not celebrate how many millions have become vulnerable,” the former vice president said.
