N12.8trn SWV: APC’s panic exposes Guilty Conscience — Atiku

By Omeiza Ajayi, Abuja

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has accused the ruling All Progressives Congress APC of dodging accountability over a ₦12.8 trillion Service-Wide Vote SWV in the 2026 Appropriation Act, saying the ruling party’s angry reaction to questions about the allocation betrays a guilty conscience rather than confidence in its own budget.

APC had, in a statement on Wednesday, said Atiku had become more disoriented and misguided than ever before in the history of his presidential ambitions, adding that he advanced no facts to support his claim of malfeasance beyond conjecture calculated to inflame and mislead Nigerians.

However, Atiku’s strategic media associate, Olusola Sanni, said in a counter on Wednesday that the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress ADC was not contesting the legitimacy of the service-wide vote as a budgetary tool but demanding answers on why the figure has surged by roughly 1,918 per cent in two years, from ₦638.34 billion in 2024 to its current level.

At the heart of the dispute is a question Sanni said the APC’s National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, avoided entirely in his earlier defence of the administration: what unforeseen emergency could justify an increase of that scale within such a short period?

“What emergency or unforeseen expenditure justifies increasing the service-wide vote from ₦638.34 billion in 2024 to over ₦12.8 trillion in 2026? That is an increase of approximately 1,918 per cent in barely two years,” Wanna said, dismissing the APC’s contingency-fund defence as a “lazy excuse”.

Sanni argued that an allocation of that magnitude now rivals the combined budgets of major sectors, including defence, education, healthcare and works, and said the absence of clearly named projects under the vote deepens suspicion that it has drifted from its original purpose.

“A contingency fund without specificity, accountability or transparency ceases to be a contingency provision and becomes precisely what Nigerians fear—a slush fund waiting to be abused,” he said.

The statement also linked the current dispute to a pattern of budget controversies it said has trailed the Bola Tinubu administration, including duplicated line items, unclear religious project allocations and unnamed palace renovation spending, all of which it claimed have weakened public trust in the federal appropriation process.

Sanni said the APC’s response to these questions had so far consisted of personal attacks rather than figures, insisting that no amount of insults from the party could substitute for a proper account of how the money would be spent.

Atiku renewed his call for the Tinubu administration to publish a full breakdown of the ₦12.8 trillion vote, naming every project, beneficiary, implementing agency and the legal basis for each expenditure, warning that until this is done, Nigerians would conclude that the APC’s outrage stems from an inability to answer the questions rather than any weakness in them.