Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has accused President Bola Tinubu of presiding over what he described as a troubling pattern of budget manipulation and abuse of public funds, following revelations that billions of naira allocated to the National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children Education were earmarked for road construction.

Atiku, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, said the disclosures, first highlighted in a Daily Trust investigation, raised fundamental questions about the integrity of the 2026 budget and the administration’s commitment to transparency. He argued that diverting funds from an agency created to tackle the country’s out-of-school children crisis to infrastructure projects outside its mandate was both a distortion of priorities and a betrayal of vulnerable children.

“Since when did the National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children Education become a road construction agency?” he asked, insisting that the arrangement suggested a deliberate attempt to hide questionable projects in obscure agencies where scrutiny is weaker and funds can be more easily diverted.

Atiku linked the budget controversy to the storm surrounding the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, PFIPC, whose self-styled Director-General, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, has alleged that senior government officials demanded billions of naira from him in connection with the proposed body.

While the Presidency has disowned the PFIPC as fictitious and described Adeyemi as an impostor who forged appointment letters purportedly signed by Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila, Atiku said official denials had failed to address the core issues. He questioned why, if Adeyemi was indeed a fraudster, he had not been promptly charged to court and how he was allegedly able to operate from the Federal Secretariat and visit the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission despite being under investigation.

Atiku maintained that Tinubu could not distance himself from the unfolding controversies. “The budget is his budget. The Appropriation Act bears his signature. The agencies involved operate under his administration,” he said, arguing that either the President approved the distortions or was unaware of them, a situation he described as evidence of complicity or an “absentee presidency.”

He called on the National Assembly to explain how such appropriations escaped scrutiny and urged a full, transparent and independent investigation into both the Almajiri commission allocations and the PFIPC saga, amid growing public concern over opaque insertions in Nigeria’s annual budgets.