Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
On Sunday, 25 October 2026, the National Youth Leader of the All Progressives Congress, Dayo Israel, published a video on his X account showing a row of brand new 2026 Toyota Land Cruiser Prado vehicles. In the accompanying post, he stated that he had presented them to his “committed selected youth leaders to aid their election mobilisation activities,” and expressed appreciation to the wife of the President, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, for her support of the party’s youth structure.
Approximately three hours later, following a wave of public criticism, the post was deleted. No explanation was offered, no cost was disclosed and no source of funds was identified.
The episode lasted three hours online, but its meaning will last much longer, because it is not an isolated lapse. It is the latest frame in a long reel of extravagance and unaccounted money at the very top of this government, running unbroken from 2023 into this very month, from the President himself, to his son, to the First Lady whose support the APC youth leader publicly acknowledged.
A CAMPAIGN ASSET, NOT A GIFT
The language of the post deserves careful reading. The vehicles were not described as welfare support or recognition of service; they were presented, in Mr Israel’s own words, for election mobilisation.
Nor is Mr Israel a peripheral figure in that effort. According to reports of a statement signed by Imo State Governor Hope Uzodimma as secretary of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, he was named deputy director of youth mobilisation for President Tinubu’s re-election campaign, under the Minister of Youth Development, Ayodele Olawande. In August 2026, he also announced the Mummy’s Men Movement, a platform inspired by the First Lady to mobilise support for a second Tinubu term.
That makes Sunday’s distribution a campaign matter at the highest level. Every serious campaign spends on mobilisation, and that is a normal feature of democratic politics. What distinguishes this case is the choice of instrument, the scale of the expenditure, the absence of any disclosure, and the timing, at a moment when the same party’s government continues to ask Nigerians for patience in the face of severe hardship.
The question is not whether a party may spend on its campaign. The question is what its spending reveals about its priorities.
THE COST, MEASURED AGAINST NIGERIAN LIVES
The video showed seven vehicles. Public estimates placed the price of a single 2026 Prado at roughly 118 million naira, and some commentators claimed the full distribution exceeded 20 vehicles and 2 billion naira; those larger figures have not been confirmed, and this analysis relies only on what the video itself showed. On that conservative basis, the seven vehicles represent close to 826 million naira.
A single vehicle at 118 million naira is equivalent to 1,686 months of the 70,000 naira national minimum wage, or roughly 140 years of a worker’s statutory pay. At an approximate cost of 2,000 naira per course of malaria treatment, one vehicle represents about 59,000 treatments, and the seven in the video represent about 413,000. These comparisons describe the trade-offs that every government and every governing party makes, whether it acknowledges them or not.
THE ECONOMIC CONTEXT
The World Bank, in its Nigeria Development Update of April 2026, reported that poverty rose to 63 per cent in 2025 and observed that household incomes had not grown fast enough to offset elevated prices. In October 2026, the global Multidimensional Poverty Index identified Nigeria among the countries where earlier progress against poverty has reversed during this decade.
Behind those figures are recognisable lives: a mother in Ajegunle rationing garri across several days; a farmer in Benue unable to reach his fields because of insecurity; a trader in Onitsha closing early for want of customers; a graduate in Ekiti accepting work that does not cover food and transport; a family in Kano leaving a clinic with a prescription it cannot afford to fill.
THE PRESIDENT: THREE YEARS OF SACRIFICE PREACHED, THREE YEARS OF LUXURY PRACTISED
For more than three years, President Tinubu has asked these citizens to accept hardship as the price of reform, while his own conduct, year after year, has told a different story. In 2023, weeks after he announced the removal of petrol subsidy, the President returned to Lagos in a convoy reported at more than 100 vehicles, and labour leaders later recounted that, when they pressed him to cut the cost of governance, he told them he was living in only a two-bedroom flat.
In 2024, while Nigerians queued for fuel and rationed food, the President flew to France in August aboard a newly acquired Airbus A330. The government never disclosed its price; the figure of more than 100 million dollars became public only after a foreign court dispute exposed the aircraft.
That same year, GovSpend records show the Presidency spent over 25.26 billion naira on travel, the highest single year of his tenure, and the ICIR found that the President and the Vice President each received 1.7 billion naira in honorariums outside their regular salaries.
The pattern carried straight into 2026. The President left Lagos on 28 December 2025 for an end-of-year break in France that ran into the new year, and in January 2026 alone he spent 22 days outside Nigeria, about 10 of them in France. When questioned about the trips, the APC National Chairman described them as a sacrifice made in the national interest.
GovSpend records analysed and published in August 2026 put the Presidency’s travel-related spending between June 2023 and April 2026 at 37.64 billion naira, by which time the President had made 51 foreign trips and spent about 261 days outside the country. On 30 August 2026, he departed for a three-week vacation in Europe, his 52nd foreign trip, and his spokesman said he would return to join the campaign for the January 2027 election.
In September 2026, asked on national television about the luxury Escalades reportedly attached to the President’s convoy, the Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service, Zacch Adedeji, answered by asking how much an Escalade costs that a Nigerian President cannot afford, and urged Nigerians not to embarrass the country. The man responsible for collecting the people’s taxes chose to defend the President’s vehicles rather than explain them.
When the President travels, it is called sacrifice. When the citizen starves, it is called reform.
THE SON: FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL JET TO THE CAMPAIGN MACHINE
Seyi Tinubu holds no elected or appointed office, yet his record in public life runs through every year of his father’s tenure. In October 2023, five months after his father told Nigerians to brace for hardship, he flew to Kano aboard a jet from the presidential fleet to attend a polo tournament, where he was received with official ceremony. Critics across the country asked by what authority a private citizen commands an aircraft maintained at public expense.
In 2024, he was reported among the delegation accompanying his father on a state visit to Qatar while Nigerians protested hunger at home.
In 2026, he has emerged as a central figure in his father’s re-election machinery through his CityBoy Movement. In October 2026, reports citing sources within the President’s camp described a struggle between him and the First Lady over control of the campaign’s youth mobilisation, pitting his CityBoy Movement against her Mummy’s Men Movement, while the President himself publicly recognised his son’s political work, saying Seyi was running after his father.
The picture is complete. Nigeria’s youth are told to endure, while the President’s son is flown to watch polo and then placed at the heart of a contest for control of the youth vote.
THE FIRST LADY: BILLIONS DISPENSED, SOURCES UNSTATED, AKARA PRESCRIBED
Senator Oluremi Tinubu’s record follows the same unbroken line. Between 2023 and 2024, GovSpend records show 553,884 dollars, worth 700.71 million naira at the rates used, released for her overseas trips to the United States, Mozambique, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom and France. Accountability groups have asked on what legal basis public funds pay for the travels of an office that is not established by law.
Daily Trust, compiling publicly available records, put the cash donations announced or facilitated through her Renewed Hope Initiative between July 2023 and July 2026 at over 15 billion naira, alongside over 25 billion naira raised in 2025 through her education fund. In April 2026, the Initiative’s food bank launch secured over 66 billion naira in pledges, including a personal pledge of 500 million naira from her.
She has consistently stated that this money does not come from government accounts but from the Initiative’s board and private friends, yet the question Daily Trust put in its own headline, who is funding these donations, has never been answered with a published list of donors and amounts. When tens of billions move around the office of a President’s wife, the public is entitled to know whose money it is and what those donors expect in return.
In August 2026, the Mummy’s Men Movement, inspired by her and convened by Dayo Israel, was announced to mobilise support for her husband’s second term. This month, she told Nigerians struggling under the weight of her husband’s policies to consider selling akara, roasted corn and kuli-kuli to earn a living, and urged them not to lose hope because the present sacrifices will benefit future generations. And on Sunday, the convener of her movement thanked her for supporting the structure that presented a fleet of 118 million naira vehicles.
That is the full picture of the Tinubu household’s counsel to the poor in 2026: sell akara, endure the reforms, hope for the next generation. That is the full picture of its conduct: the jet, the polo, the convoys, the Escalades, the 52 foreign trips, the European vacation, the rival campaign movements, and now the Prados.
They ask the poor to sacrifice for the next generation. They have not asked themselves to sacrifice for this one.
THE MISSING TRILLIONS
The luxury of the First Family is only the visible half of the record; the other half is money the government cannot account for. On 1 July 2026, Reuters reported that the International Monetary Fund’s Article IV review had identified about 8.8 trillion naira in spending outside the budget, a finding the Finance Minister denied.
The government had told Nigerians that petrol subsidy removal released about 15.8 trillion naira in savings, savings that would return to the people as roads, hospitals, schools and relief. Yet on 30 July 2026, the same Finance Minister conceded to Reuters that the savings had been absorbed by debt servicing rather than delivered to the households that bore the pain. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index scored Nigeria 26 out of 100, placing it 142nd of 182 countries.
A government that cannot show where trillions went has no standing to ask the poor to tighten their belts, and certainly no standing to watch its campaign’s youth mobiliser hand out Prados while that question remains unanswered.
The people were told their sacrifice would be returned to them. It was returned to someone else.
THE QUESTION OF FUNDING
Against that backdrop of missing trillions, Sunday’s convoy raises a smaller question of the same kind. Mr Israel did not state the cost of the vehicles, nor did he identify who paid for them, through which account, or from which supplier, and multiple news organisations reporting on the matter noted the same omissions.
Some critics have alleged that public funds were involved. The Narrative Force does not assert that as fact, but observes that the allegation can be resolved quickly by the party itself through publication of the purchase documentation, the source of funds and the full list of recipients.
The Narrative Force therefore calls on the APC National Working Committee, the Presidential Campaign Council and Mr Israel to disclose, without delay, the cost of the vehicles, the source of the funds and the identities of the beneficiaries. Given the public acknowledgement of the First Lady in the original post, and Mr Israel’s role as convener of the movement she inspired, it calls equally on her office to state clearly whether any resource connected to her, to the Renewed Hope Initiative or to the Mummy’s Men Movement was involved.
WHAT “SELECTED” TELLS US
Mr Israel described the recipients as “committed selected youth leaders.” The phrase describes a model of politics in which resources are concentrated among a chosen few, who are then expected to manage the sentiment of the many.
Nigeria’s young people are not a mobilisation target, and they are not a prize to be divided between the President’s wife and the President’s son. They are the majority of the electorate and the generation most affected by the cost of education, unemployment, insecurity and emigration. A party seeking their confidence would speak to those concerns with policy; instead, its youth leadership spoke through a display of vehicles.
A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT
The Prado distribution sits comfortably within this record. From the presidential jet to the son’s polo flight, from the First Lady’s foreign travel to the Escalade defence on national television, from the 52nd foreign trip to the trillions that vanished into debt service and off-budget spending, and now to the youth wing’s Prados, a single principle is visible across every year of this administration: the comfort of those in power is insulated from the conditions of those they govern, and the people’s money is treated as theirs to spend without account.
Equally telling is the sequence of events on Sunday. The vehicles were procured, assembled, presented and filmed, and at no stage did anyone within the party structure appear to question whether this was appropriate. The reconsideration came only after public exposure, and it took the form of deletion rather than explanation.
The concern is not that Nigerians saw the vehicles. The concern is that no one in the party thought they should not.
A DIFFERENT STANDARD FOR 2027
The 2027 election offers Nigerians a choice between different understandings of the purpose of government. Atiku Abubakar, the candidate of the African Democratic Congress, has stated that the welfare of the citizen is the fundamental responsibility of government and that Nigeria has the resources to care for its people.
His economic plans have been published in advance and placed before Nigerians for examination: a shift towards domestic production, transparent and audited management of public savings, and relief directed to the households that have carried the burden of recent policy. His campaign organises openly and does not present luxury as a substitute for a programme.
The video has been deleted, but the questions remain. What did the vehicles cost? Who paid for them? Where did the subsidy savings and the off-budget trillions go? And how can a First Family that flies, travels and spends on this scale, year after year, continue to instruct the poor to endure?
Nigerians are entitled to answers. They are also entitled to weigh this record carefully when they vote. The ballot remains the most effective instrument available to citizens for holding power to account, and its value depends on being cast freely, informed by the record, and protected through to the final count.
82 days remain until 16 January 2027.
#PradoCampaign #Atiku2027 #ADC2027 #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
27 October 2026
