By Afolayan Sunday
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has intensified pressure on the Federal Government, demanding an immediate, independent audit and full accountability regarding billions of naira allocated for social intervention schemes.
The call for a probe follows recent explosive disclosures by the Auditor-General for the Federation, which flagged ₦33.75 billion in electronic cash transfers made to unverified beneficiaries across 35 states.
The Office of the Auditor-General revealed that ₦33.75 billion was disbursed to over 3.29 million households in 2023 without complete beneficiary details or required reconciliation statements.
Atiku’s camp pointed out deep discrepancies in the government’s social spending claims, contrasting the recent audit flags with wide variances between 10 million and 15 million reported beneficiary households.
Atiku, the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), vowed to constitute an independent team of experts to trace ₦33.75 billion reportedly paid to 3.29 million vulnerable Nigerian households.
In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, on Saturday, the former vice president said the audit findings amounted to a devastating indictment of a government that took away the poor man’s subsidy, increased his taxes and tariffs, promised support, and is now confronted with serious questions over whether that support ever reached him.
Shaibu quoted Atiku as saying the figures themselves expose the cruelty and inadequacy of the intervention, noting that ₦33.75 billion divided among 3.29 million households amounts to barely ₦10,258 per household.
According to the statement, after removing subsidy, driving up transport fares, electricity costs and food prices, the President Bola Tinubu administration’s supposed intervention amounts to roughly ₦10,000 per household, and even that sum has now failed to withstand basic audit scrutiny.
“This is beyond a bookkeeping scandal. The intervention is insultingly small, yet even that small amount cannot be cleanly accounted for. If money meant for hungry Nigerians cannot be satisfactorily traced while access to records required for accountability is frustrated, then what we are witnessing is unapologetic wickedness against the poor. You cannot punish people with hardship and then play hide-and-seek with money appropriated in their name,” Atiku said.
“It now appears that the Tinubu administration cannot give Nigerians a coherent account of how many households actually benefited from its intervention programme, while significant portions of the expenditure have failed to withstand independent audit scrutiny,” he said, insisting that “a ministerial announcement is not proof of payment. A name on a social register is not a bank alert.
“These cannot be dismissed as another set of bogus figures buried in government accounts. These are resources appropriated in the name of poor Nigerians who desperately need protection from a cost-of-living crisis aggravated by this administration’s rash economic policies,” he said.
Explaining the rationale for the planned probe, he said Nigerians could not reasonably be expected to trust the same government whose expenditure was under question to investigate itself.
He said, “My team will constitute an independent group of financial, audit, technology and public-accounting experts to interrogate the available records surrounding these cash-transfer payments. We will follow the money as far as the available public and institutional records permit. We will examine the beneficiary figures, payment channels, reconciliation records, audit queries, and every material inconsistency that has emerged. When that work is completed, we will furnish Nigerians with the findings.
“There must be no black box around the poor man’s money. If Remita processed these transactions, the relevant records should be available for scrutiny. If beneficiaries received the money, there should be evidence. If access to records was obstructed, Nigerians deserve to know by whom and why.”
