Seven Prado SUVs stayed on Dayo Israel’s timeline for about three hours before he took the video down. The questions they raised have not gone anywhere.
Israel, the national youth leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), posted the clip on X on Sunday 25 October. It showed brand-new 2026 Toyota Land Cruiser Prados handed to selected party youth leaders to help them mobilise voters for the 2027 elections.
He also thanked First Lady Oluremi Tinubu for her support to the party structure. Premium Times reported that he deleted the post roughly three hours later, after a wave of criticism, and offered no public explanation.
The timing did the party no favours. On Saturday, at the APC’s presidential campaign flag-off in Kaduna, President Bola Tinubu had blamed opposition politicians for hunger and poverty. Within a day, his party’s youth wing was showing off a convoy.
Nobody has published a price. The Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) did the sums in public and put a new Prado at about ₦145 million each. On that estimate, the Prado SUVs cost roughly ₦1.015 billion together. That is the NDC’s guess, not an invoice.
Daily Trust reported that the First Lady confirmed she donated the vehicles to the APC national youth wing. It added that the purchase price and funding arrangements were not made public.
The First Lady has now confirmed that she donated the Prado SUVs, but that leaves a different question unanswered: where did the money used to acquire them come from? No purchase price or funding arrangement has been made public.
The July meeting is worth a second look. She urged the young leaders to embrace patience, contentment and hard work, and warned them against chasing quick success. Israel told her they had arrived without vehicles and were leaving with new buses. He also said they were now “mummy’s men for Asiwaju”.
Fewer than three months later, the buses had become Prados.
The party has pushed back. Felix Morka, the APC national publicity secretary, said on live television on Monday that people brand vehicles in every campaign season to move around. “It’s not as if they were given as a reward,” he said.
The original post gives critics something to work with, though. Israel described the recipients as his committed, selected youth leaders. Critics say that reads more like a thank you than logistics.
Professor Pat Utomi, an NDC chieftain, asked how the Prado SUVs sit with the pay of soldiers. “Nigerian soldiers are being paid peanuts as salaries,” he wrote on X.
Paul Ibe, media aide to opposition figure Atiku Abubakar, wanted to know who paid for the Prado SUVs and who received them. “The Nigerian treasury is not the APC’s campaign purse,” he wrote. He urged the EFCC and INEC to examine the funding.
The anger did not come only from opponents. Some party supporters called the display insensitive and warned that it handed rivals a campaign gift. One described Israel as a liability.
Seven Prado SUVs are small money in a national campaign. The bigger issue is transparency. Nigerians still do not know who paid, and a party asking for patience on prices cannot easily stay quiet about its own spending.
There is also a clash of messages. The government points to a World Bank update showing poverty stabilising for the first time since 2019. The National Bureau of Statistics puts September food inflation at 19.59 per cent. The Bank’s 2025 estimates still counted about 123 million Nigerians in extreme poverty.
Families feel the food price first. A convoy of new SUVs looks like a different priority, whatever the intention.
Claims online that more than 20 vehicles were handed out nationwide, at over ₦2 billion, remain unverified. Reports on the video identify seven Prado SUVs.
The post is gone. The Prado SUVs are not, and neither is the question of who paid for them.
