Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has challenged President Bola Tinubu’s administration to reconcile conflicting figures on the number of households reached under its expanded cash-transfer programme.
Atiku said 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” raised serious questions about the programme’s implementation and the government’s management of public funds.
In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, on Thursday, the African Democratic Congress presidential candidate asked the Federal Government to explain what happened to the five million households missing from the latest figure.
“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,” the statement read in part.
