By Secrets Reporters
The Bayelsa State Government voted N649.5 million for treatment of its officials in foreign hospitals in 2026, up from N529.5 million approved for the same purpose last year, even as its own Government House budget, which carries the governor and his closest officials, slashed its foreign-medical vote from N93.5 million to just N9.5 million, official spending records examined by SecretsReporters show.
The same Government House carries N76.5 million for medical expenses within Nigeria this year, down from N200 million approved in 2025, and N7,034,361 as medical allowance. In other words, the seat of government that runs the state budgets eight times more for local treatment than for foreign treatment for its own house yet the state as a whole keeps a swelling offshore medical war chest that rose by N120 million year on year.
The numbers sit inside a statewide medical budget that also approved N991,726,500 for medical expenses within the country in 2026, giving a combined foreign-and-local medical provision of about N1.64 billion across all ministries, departments and agencies.
Money has already moved. In the first half of 2026, the state released N165,225,000 on international medical expenses, representing 25.4 per cent of the N649.5 million provision with N50,225,000 in the first quarter and ₦115,000,000 in the second. On the local side, N443,047,890.44 was spent against the N991,726,500 approval, a performance of 44.7 per cent. The quarterly records do not publish actual spending line by line within each office, so how much of these sums passed through Government House, the Deputy Governor’s Office or the General Services Bureau cannot be isolated from the published figures.
The collapse of Government House’s own foreign-medical vote is one of the sharpest cuts in the 2026 budget. In 2025, N93.5 million was approved for international medical expenses at Government House and N48 million had been spent between January and September. For 2026, only N9.5 million was approved, a cut of nearly 90 per cent. Its local medical expenses line fell from N200 million to N76.5 million, with N29,543,650 recorded as spent on the 2025 line in the first nine months of last year.
The Deputy Governor’s Office took the same medicine. Its local medical line was cut from N12 million in 2025 to N5 million in 2026, its international line from N45 million to N5 million, with N750,000 approved as medical allowance. The General Services Bureau, the office that services the Governor’s Office, carries N15,000,000 for local medical expenses.
The shrinking votes at Government House and the Deputy Governor’s Office make the growth of the statewide foreign-medical provision all the harder to explain. While the two offices that actually house the governor and his deputy were stripped of foreign-treatment funding, the overall state envelope for treatment abroad grew to N649.5 million and began spending early: N50.2 million was already gone by the end of March, before the second quarter added another N115 million.
The frame is the familiar one: clinics they never use, as they still fly abroad for treatment. A full-text sweep of the 2026 records by our newspaper found no line anywhere for the construction, renovation or equipping of a Government House clinic. The medical votes exist for trips; the clinic does not exist in the budget at all.
The irony is recorded in the government’s own figures. Government House’s foreign-medical budget collapsed to N9.5 million, yet the statewide foreign-medical provision rose to N649.5 million, with N165.2 million already released in the first half of the year. The officials who cut their own house’s foreign-treatment vote nearly to nothing kept the state’s foreign-treatment war chest growing.
