Nigeria’s cash transfer to the poor is under fresh scrutiny after the Office of the Auditor General for the Federation reported that it could not confirm whether N33.75 billion paid to more than 3.29 million households in 2023 reached genuine beneficiaries, a finding that has surfaced just as the Federal Government rolls out a new one billion dollar social protection programme.
The finding is contained in the 2024 Annual Report on Non Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies, which examined the accounts of the National Cash Transfer Office in Abuja for the 2023 financial year. The report was forwarded to the National Assembly on 17 July 2026. According to the auditors, N33.751 billion was electronically transferred to 3,295,207 households drawn from the National Social Register and enrolled on the National Beneficiary Register across 35 states. What they could not do was verify who actually received the money. The payment vouchers, the report said, lacked complete beneficiary details, and a Remita statement that would match recipients against the two official registers was not produced for examination.
The auditors were blunt about the obstacle they said they encountered. They reported that efforts to obtain the Remita records were denied by accounts staff of the office, which, in their words, frustrated the audit and made it difficult to establish whether the recipients were legitimate. The report recommended that the National Programme Manager account for the sum or refund any amount that could not be verified, and appear before the relevant National Assembly Public Accounts Committees. It noted that its findings stood because management had not responded to the queries at the time of reporting. In all, the audit raised eight separate queries against the office, including a request for N4.62 billion in 101 payments whose paid vouchers were not presented.
The cash transfer office has since rejected the interpretation that the money was lost. In a statement issued on 10 September 2026, the National Cash Transfer Office said an audit observation is not, in itself, a determination that funds were stolen, diverted or misappropriated, and that such observations ordinarily require management responses and reconciliation before any conclusion is reached. It said the payments were made through an established electronic architecture to beneficiaries captured in the National Beneficiary Register, and that recipients were not paid merely on the strength of submitted names but through records subjected to identification, validation and authorisation controls. The office also disputed the claim that it obstructed access to the Remita statement, saying it held email correspondence, carrying dated timestamps, showing that beneficiary data and payment reports were transmitted to the auditors and were available for independent verification. Printing millions of records to attach to individual vouchers, it argued, was unnecessary where a complete electronic trail existed.
The two positions can be reconciled on one point that is easy to lose in the noise. An inability to verify is not the same as proof of theft. The auditors did not conclude that N33.75 billion was stolen; they concluded that the documentation before them was insufficient to confirm the payments reached genuine beneficiaries. Equally, the office’s insistence that records exist does not close the query, which remains open until the National Assembly examines the evidence and the reconciliation is completed. Both are matters of record rather than opinion.
The wider history is what gives the finding its weight. Nigeria’s social investment architecture has been dogged by verification failures since the Social Investment Programme was created under the 2016 budget. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission previously investigated an alleged N37.1 billion fraud in the scheme linked to a former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Sadiya Umar Farouq. Her successor, Betta Edu, was suspended in early 2024 following a reported N585 million payment into a private account, and Halima Shehu, a former head of the National Social Investment Programme Agency, was arrested over the alleged movement of about N44 billion. None of these matters has produced a concluded conviction on the headline sums, and the individuals concerned are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but the pattern is why each new query draws immediate suspicion.
The scale of what the state now spends on cash transfers raises the stakes further. The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Bernard Doro, said in late August that more than N600 billion had been disbursed in three tranches since 2023, reaching slightly more than 10 million households. He acknowledged that the ministry had not yet carried out an impact assessment to establish how many people the transfers had lifted out of poverty. That admission sits awkwardly beside the government’s own claims. At the launch of five World Bank backed programmes worth about 3.05 billion dollars in July 2026, President Bola Tinubu said the expanded cash transfer programme had reached 15 million households and lifted an estimated 7.5 million people out of poverty. The 7.5 million figure and the absence of an impact assessment cannot both be firm, and the discrepancy is itself part of the accountability question.
The independent poverty data offer little comfort. The World Bank’s April 2026 Nigeria Development Update put the national poverty rate at about 63 per cent, equivalent to roughly 140 million people, and noted that the rollout of the targeted transfers to 15 million vulnerable households had been slower than planned. Whatever has been spent, the poverty headline has not moved down.
The timing sharpens the debate. The government has launched a fresh one billion dollar social protection scheme, HOPE-SP, part of the World Bank supported package, structured around external financing of about 800 million dollars, a federal contribution of about 150 million dollars and state level contributions of about 50 million dollars. That means further borrowing layered on a programme whose 2023 payments the country’s own auditors could not fully verify. The recurring weakness across every phase has been the same: the difficulty of proving that money reaching official registers actually reaches real people. Until the Remita reconciliation the auditors requested is placed before the Public Accounts Committees and made public, the N33.75 billion will remain a question rather than a closed account, and the new billion dollar programme will carry the burden of that unanswered question with it.