Figures have no biography. Answer the question you fled.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Four numbers, printed by the Federal Government of Nigeria, in a document anyone may read.
The Service-Wide Vote in the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning stood at N638 billion in the 2025 budget. In the 2026 Appropriation Act it reads N12.8 trillion. That is a rise of roughly 1,918 per cent in twelve months. Beneath it sits a personnel provision of N2.19 trillion, while the entire Federal Ministry of Finance carries N54.8 billion for the same purpose.
Four questions follow. Who spends it. On what. Under what legal authority. Who are these workers.
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar asked them out loud. The All Progressives Congress replied at considerable length and answered none of them.
Hold those figures throughout. They are the only things in this affair that do not flinch when insulted.
THE QUESTION HE COULD HAVE ANSWERED BEFORE LUNCH
Begin where the reply is most naked.
Who are the workers earning N2.19 trillion?
Not a theory. Not an accusation. Not a matter of opinion or interpretation. A payroll question with a payroll answer, settled in a single paragraph by any man with sight of a nominal roll. A personnel line forty times the size of the Ministry of Finance’s own either corresponds to living Nigerians drawing real salaries, or it does not.
Felix Morka had the chance to name the agencies and end this business before his tea went cold. He would not go within a mile of it. He walked past that question the way a debtor walks past his creditor’s stall on market day, eyes forward, greeting nobody, quickening slightly.
That silence is louder than every insult he managed to type.
You do not lecture a man on what a fund is when he has asked you what is inside it.
HIS OWN DEFINITION CONVICTS HIM
Then comes the unforced error, and it is fatal.
A contingency exists, by his own definition, for expenditure that could not be foreseen when the budget was passed. Splendid. Let him now explain how this government foresaw, with such exquisite precision, that the unforeseeable would this year cost nineteen times what it cost last year.
Either the spending is genuinely unforeseen, in which case no man alive could have priced it at N12.8 trillion in advance, or it was foreseen in enough detail to be priced that exactly, in which case it belongs in the open votes of the ministries that will spend it, itemised, defended and defensible.
It cannot be both. He wrote the definition himself. The definition hangs the budget. A contingency of this magnitude has ceased to be a contingency. It is a second budget wearing a modest name and hiding behind a technicality.
WHEN YOU CANNOT ANSWER THE NUMBERS, ABUSE THE MAN
Every failing government keeps one man whose entire job is to stand between a nation and an answer. He does not govern. He does not account. He arrives when the ledger is embarrassing and fills the room with fog until the deadline passes and everyone goes home tired.
This week Nigeria met the finest living practitioner of the trade.
Count what he offered in reply to the allegation. Not one figure explaining the sum. Not one agency named. Not one naira accounted for. Not one line of the document his own government printed. Pure wind, cut into paragraphs and served hot.
He opens by teaching Nigerians what a Service-Wide Vote is. It is long established. It meets government-wide obligations. It caters for the unforeseen. Other democracies have similar arrangements. Wonderful. Entirely irrelevant. Nobody asked what the instrument is. Every literate Nigerian already knows, including the market women he plainly assumes cannot read and the students he assumes cannot count.
Defending the category while refusing to open the box is not a rebuttal. It is a man standing in front of a locked door delivering a lecture on the history of doors, and hoping the crowd forgets it came to see inside.
Then, unable to explain N12.8 trillion, the ruling party reached for the oldest reflex of the cornered debater and went for the questioner’s throat. The ghost of his sordid past. Disoriented. Misguided. Petty peddler of fake news. Rudderless.
Study the placement, because the placement is the entire trick. Every adjective sits precisely where a figure should have stood. Where an honest spokesman writes a number, Morka writes a mood, then prays the newspapers close before anybody spots the substitution. Strip the adjectives out and weigh the remainder. There is no remainder. What was published is terminological inexactitude dressed as indignation, demagoguery bellowed at length for an audience the party has decided is too hungry to do arithmetic.
Figures have no biography. N12.8 trillion is not explained by disliking the man who read it aloud. Abuse the auditor from now until harvest if it pleases you. No account in the history of accounting has ever balanced itself out of sympathy.
A windbag is not merely a man who talks too much. He is a man who talks exactly as long as it takes for the question to die of exhaustion.
And his masterpiece deserves framing. The number is in the Appropriation Act. His government wrote it. His government printed it. His government carried it to the National Assembly. And there stands Morka, speaking for the party that produced the document, announcing to the nation that the man who read it out has produced no evidence. A citizen who reads the state’s own ledger aloud is not speculating. He is quoting. The party’s quarrel is not with Atiku at all. It is with its own arithmetic, and arithmetic does not read press statements.
Since he chose to sneer at those years, put the two decades side by side in the open. The economy he calls wasteful grew from 58 billion dollars in 1999 to 270 billion dollars in 2007. Let him bring his own record and lay it against that one, any day, any platform, any hour. We will come with figures. He will come, as always, with vocabulary.
The burden of proof does not sit with the citizen asking to see the books. It sits with the government holding them shut.
THE PARADE, AND THE ORNAMENT
When the question became unbearable, out came the procession. Loans. Wages. Credit schemes. Compressed gas. Palliatives. Tax reform. Infrastructure. Keep marching, keep the drums loud, keep the eye moving.
Nowhere in that parade is one official who can say who spends the N12.8 trillion. A parade is loud and a question is quiet, and loudness usually wins the evening bulletin. Argue those programmes on their own day, on their own merits. Not one of them is an answer. No auditor on this earth accepts a recital of the company’s charities in place of an entry for a missing sum.
A list of good deeds has never once functioned as a receipt, though it does photograph beautifully.
He then proclaims a government committed to fiscal discipline and transparency, and refuses the single act that would prove it. Transparency is not a sentence in a press release. It is a spreadsheet. If this vote is as innocent as he swears on his party’s behalf, the quarrel ends the instant the government publishes the line-by-line breakdown. One page. It would humiliate the opposition, vindicate the administration, and cost nothing but the trouble of printing.
He wrote many pages of abuse rather than release that one page. Let every Nigerian ask himself why an innocent man chooses the longest, hardest, angriest road home.
WHILE YOU WERE BUSY WITH ADJECTIVES
Mr Morka, the Service-Wide Vote is not one lonely question. It is the newest entry in a ledger grown so long that Nigerians have stopped expecting replies. Every item below comes from the government’s own institutions. Not from Atiku. Not from the ADC. Not from us.
The Central Bank of Nigeria owes the Federal Government N5.3 trillion in unremitted operating surplus. That is not our figure. That is the Director of Revenue and Investment in the Office of the Accountant-General, testifying before the House Public Accounts Committee this month, telling lawmakers the apex bank was directed to remit and simply refused.
N16 billion, and then another N15 billion, taken from the account of the Universal Basic Education Commission and not refunded. The chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said it in open session. Basic education. The money for classrooms, in a country carrying the largest population of out-of-school children on earth.
Over N70 billion queried in the same manner at NASENI, with several other agencies raising identical complaints.
The Senate’s own ad hoc committee reported unaccounted domestic crude sale differentials of about 22 billion dollars, an 81 billion dollar shortfall between what the NNPC declared and what the Central Bank recorded, and forensic projections running beyond 200 billion dollars in unaccounted crude oil proceeds. That report was adopted on the floor of a Senate his party controls.
The Auditor-General for the Federation, in a report of more than eight hundred pages, documented questionable payments, inflated contracts and irregular settlements at the NNPC running past 51 million dollars.
About 2.79 billion dollars was released for three refineries, roughly 1.56 billion for Port Harcourt, 740 million for Kaduna, 492 million for Warri. Nigeria has no functioning refinery to show for it. The EFCC has so far recovered N9.4 billion and 21.2 million dollars and questioned more than thirty NNPCL officials.
And now, stacked on top of all of it, one budget heading of N12.8 trillion that nobody will explain.
You do not need a forensic accountant to find Nigeria’s missing money. You need a government willing to answer a question.
Let nobody insult us with the reply that some of these files opened before 2023. Nobody is asking who opened the file. Nigerians are asking what this administration has recovered, whom it has charged, who has gone to prison, and where the money sits today. A government in its fourth year does not get to point at the calendar. It inherited the ledger and it now owns it.
ANSWER THE PEOPLE, NOT ATIKU
Mr Morka, here is the part your statement never grasped.
You wrote as though this were a quarrel between your party and one man in Adamawa. It is not. Atiku merely asked the question out loud. The people who need the answer are not in Adamawa and they are not in the ADC.
They are the mother in Ado Ekiti who now buys garri in cups because she can no longer buy it in paint rubbers. The student whose fees have outrun his father’s salary. The nurse who has watched her wages turn into an insult. The trader who borrowed for transport that doubled and never came down. The pensioner counting coins in a queue that never moves.
This government told those Nigerians their suffering was necessary. It asked them to bear the removal of subsidy, the collapse of the naira, the price of every commodity in every market, and it promised the savings would come back to them. They bore it. They are still bearing it.
Every naira parked in an unexplained heading is a naira absent from a classroom, a ward, a road, a farm, a payroll a family eats from. And the reply the ruling party sends to that nation is a sneer. Not an explanation. A sneer. That is not fiscal responsibility. It is contempt, and contempt at this scale, sustained long enough, is precisely how a country is hollowed out from the inside while the press releases keep improving in style.
A people asked to sacrifice have earned the right to see the receipts.
They are entitled to ask, without being called mischievous for asking, where their common wealth has gone. That is not partisanship. It is the ordinary right of an owner to inspect his own property, and the wealth of this country belongs to them, not to the party currently holding the keys.
You are not the spokesman of a private company, sir. You speak for a party governing a nation in pain. When such a nation asks where its money is, the answer is a document, not a diatribe.
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY IS ON TRIAL HERE TOO
There is a second address for this question, and it is not Aso Rock. The National Assembly appropriated this money.
A line-by-line interrogation of the Service-Wide Vote is not a favour to the opposition. It is the ordinary work of a parliament that respects itself. Wave through the largest and least explained provision in the entire budget without one public question, and our legislators will have told Nigerians exactly what they are for, and exactly whose errand they run.
FIVE QUESTIONS. NO ADJECTIVES REQUIRED.
We reduce it, for the party’s convenience, to what a clerk could answer in an afternoon.
One. Publish the line-by-line breakdown of the N12.8 trillion Service-Wide Vote.
Two. Name the agencies and the staff numbers behind the N2.19 trillion personnel provision.
Three. State the legal authority under which the sum will be released and the officer who authorises each release.
Four. Explain how expenditure described as unforeseen was priced at nineteen times last year’s provision.
Five. Tell Nigerians what has been recovered, and who has been charged, on the queries already raised by the Auditor-General, the Public Accounts Committee and the Senate.
Five documents. No adjectives required. Any government with clean books can produce them this week.
THE QUESTION IS STILL STANDING
So we hand it back precisely where he found it. Untouched. Unanswered. Undented by a single word he wrote.
Atiku’s demand was conditional and it was fair. Account for the money in full, or Nigerians are entitled to draw their own conclusions about why it is buried. Morka had one duty and one only. He staged a performance instead, and the performance told us more than he intended.
Publish the breakdown. Answer the Auditor-General. Answer the Public Accounts Committee. Answer the Senate’s own report. Then answer the people who have paid for all of it with years of their lives.
They are not asking you to be eloquent, sir. They are asking you to account.
Eloquence is not accountability. One of them can be printed. Only the other can be audited.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
23 July 2026
