BOMBSHELL: ATIKU’S “SCAM OF NUMBERS” ATTACK COLLIDES WITH HIS OWN ECONOMIC RECORD
By Gloria Fraser, MFR
Headlinenews.News Special Investigative Report
Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar has dismissed the dramatic rise in Federation Account Allocation Committee revenues under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a “scam of numbers.”
It is a devastating political soundbite.
There is just one problem.
Atiku’s own economic prescriptions undermine the central impression created by his attack.
The former Vice-President now condemns the consequences of exchange-rate adjustment, yet he himself advocated eliminating Nigeria’s multiple exchange-rate windows—the very system whose dismantling contributed to the sharp adjustment of the official naira rate.
That is not speculation. It is Atiku’s own policy position.
ATIKU’S OWN WORDS COME BACK TO THE WITNESS BOX
Explaining how he would have managed Nigeria’s economy, Atiku said he was committed to eliminating multiple exchange rates because the system enriched:
“opportunists, rent-seekers, middlemen, arbitrageurs, and fraudsters.”
That admission goes to the heart of today’s argument.
Atiku recognised that Nigeria’s old exchange-rate structure was distorted.
His disagreement with Tinubu is principally over method and speed. Atiku says he would have pursued a managed and more gradual adjustment.
That is a perfectly legitimate economic argument.
But it is profoundly different from suggesting that Tinubu simply took a healthy ₦460/$ currency and inexplicably destroyed it.
THE ₦460 DOLLAR WAS NOT THE WHOLE MARKET
The naira’s depreciation under Tinubu has been enormous.
Any defence of the administration that pretends otherwise would be propaganda rather than analysis.
But the frequently quoted ₦460/$ rate inherited in May 2023 was an official rate operating beside a substantially weaker parallel-market rate.
Nigeria effectively had different prices for the same dollar.
Those able to access scarce official foreign exchange enjoyed an advantage unavailable to many manufacturers, businesses and ordinary Nigerians.
Tinubu’s 2023 reform did not invent all the weakness in the naira.
It exposed much of the weakness that the official price had concealed.
And Atiku himself had already diagnosed the multiple-rate system as benefiting rent-seekers and arbitrageurs.
That is the contradiction his “scam of numbers” rhetoric cannot erase.
FAAC IS NOT A DOLLAR BANK ACCOUNT
Atiku’s second argument is equally vulnerable.
He compares approximately ₦7.85 trillion in FAAC allocations in 2019 with about ₦21.9 trillion in 2025 and argues that the later figure is worth less when translated into dollars.
The arithmetic may illustrate the impact of currency depreciation.
But it does not prove that the increase in domestic government revenue is a scam.
Nigeria’s teachers are paid in naira.
Pensioners receive naira.
Local-government workers receive naira.
Much government procurement, local construction, salaries and domestic expenditure are denominated in naira.
Of course inflation has destroyed part of that purchasing power, while imported equipment and materials have become dramatically more expensive.
That qualification matters.
But converting every naira distributed by FAAC into dollars and presenting the dollar equivalent as the definitive measurement of its economic value is selective.
The naira’s weakness is real. So is the increase in nominal Federation revenue. One fact does not cancel the other.
ATIKU CANNOT START NIGERIA’S CURRENCY HISTORY IN MAY 2023
There is another inconvenient historical fact.
The naira did not begin depreciating when Bola Tinubu became President.
When the Obasanjo-Atiku administration entered office in 1999, the official exchange rate averaged roughly ₦92 to the dollar. By 2003, it was around ₦129.
The currency subsequently strengthened somewhat during their later years, while that administration also deserves recognition for the historic Paris Club debt-relief achievement.
But the larger point remains:
Nigeria’s currency problems did not arrive with Tinubu.
They developed through decades of dependence on oil receipts, weak industrial production, enormous import demand, inadequate non-oil exports and repeated exchange-rate interventions.
Atiku knows this.
He governed through part of that history.
THEN THERE IS ATIKU’S OWN REFORM RECORD
Atiku was not an innocent spectator while Nigeria experimented with difficult economic restructuring.
As Vice-President, he chaired the National Council on Privatisation during one of the country’s most ambitious privatisation periods.
That programme produced successes—but also serious controversies.
NITEL and the disastrous Pentascope management episode became enduring warnings about what can happen when economic reform collides with poor execution, disputed competence and governance failures.
There is no basis for attributing every problematic transaction personally to Atiku, and Headlinenews.News does not do so.
But there is an unavoidable political irony.
A central figure in one of Nigeria’s most aggressive reform governments is now attacking another government as though disruptive restructuring were invented in 2023.
Atiku knows reforms can hurt.
He knows implementation can fail.
He knows governments sometimes have to adjust policy.
And, most importantly, he knows the economic distortions Tinubu confronted were not created by Tinubu.
THE REAL QUESTION ATIKU’S ARGUMENT AVOIDS
Nigeria’s fundamental currency problem is bigger than Tinubu and bigger than Atiku.
Why does Africa’s most populous country remain so desperately hungry for dollars?
Nigeria imports machinery, pharmaceuticals, technology, vehicles, industrial inputs, spare parts and countless consumer products.
For decades, one of the world’s major crude-oil producers even exported crude while importing huge quantities of refined petroleum products.
Every avoidable import creates additional demand for foreign currency.
No President can permanently command that pressure away.
Nigeria must produce.
Refine more petroleum domestically.
Manufacture medicines and industrial inputs.
Expand agriculture and agro-processing.
Increase non-oil exports.
Build electricity capacity.
Attract productive investment.
That—not political arithmetic—is ultimately how Nigeria builds a stronger currency.
Tinubu should therefore be judged not merely by whether he unified exchange rates, but by whether the reforms eventually produce a more productive economy and better living standards.
And that verdict is still being written.
WHERE DID THE EXTRA FAAC MONEY GO?
There is nevertheless one question Atiku’s intervention should force Nigerians to ask.
If Federation revenues have increased so dramatically, where are the results?
That question should not stop at Aso Rock.
FAAC belongs to the federation.
Governors have received substantially larger allocations.
Local governments are receiving public money.
So Nigerians should demand accountability from all three tiers of government.
Where are the roads?
Where are the hospitals?
Where are the schools?
Where is improved water supply?
Where are the agricultural programmes?
Where is the relief for households?
Higher allocations cannot become an excuse for lower accountability.
That is where opposition scrutiny would serve Nigeria better than calling the figures themselves a scam.
NATIONAL PATRIOTS POSITION
The National Patriots welcomes rigorous scrutiny of President Tinubu’s economic record. No administration should be protected from legitimate criticism.
But criticism must survive its own evidence.
Atiku himself advocated eliminating Nigeria’s multiple exchange-rate windows. He participated at the highest level in an administration that pursued liberalisation and extensive privatisation. And Nigeria’s structural currency weakness predates May 2023 by decades.
President Tinubu must nevertheless accept responsibility for the severity of the adjustment under his watch. Macroeconomic statistics mean little to a family that cannot afford food, transportation, healthcare or school fees. Increased government revenue must now translate much faster into measurable household welfare.
That is the legitimate challenge.
But calling increased Federation revenue a “scam of numbers” because the naira now converts into fewer dollars confuses two separate realities.
The depreciation is real.
The increased Federation revenue is real.
The hardship is real.
And the duty to turn greater public resources into better lives belongs to the Federal Government, 36 governors and 774 local governments.
Atiku is entitled to challenge Tinubu’s treatment.
But there is a fatal weakness in pretending the disease began with the doctor.
Atiku’s own economic record says otherwise.
Headlinenews.News Special Investigative Desk
