By Secrets Reporters
N232 million was set aside this year to pay the medical bills of the governor’s household offices. No clinic was budgeted for them to use.
Official spending records examined by SecretsReporters show the Government House in Benin City earmarked N136 million for “Medical Expenses-Local” in 2026. The Deputy Governor’s office got N70 million of its own. The Directorate of Government House and Protocol was voted N26 million. Together, the offices around Governor Monday Okpebholo budgeted N232 million for their own local medical expenses, a provision set aside for the health of a handful of the most powerful people in Edo State.
The budget contains no Government House clinic line anywhere in its 613 pages. Searches for a clinic, a medical centre or a sick bay under any Government House-family office turned up nothing. The only clinic matches in the approved 2026 budget belong to a traffic agency’s sick bay and to public medical centres meant for the general public.
The quarterly records do not disclose sub-line releases, so what has been spent of the three provisions cannot be stated. The second-quarter record was never published. The announced publication attached the wrong file, leaving only the first-quarter record, which publishes releases only as state-wide aggregates.
Local medical expenses across all ministries, departments and agencies were approved at N904.98 million, with N174.68 million released in the first quarter, a 19.3 per cent burn rate. The governor’s household offices account for more than a quarter of the entire state’s local medical provision.
For treatment abroad, the records speak by their silence. The entire state’s provision for international medical expenses, the only line of its kind in Edo’s 2026 budget, sits not in any governor’s office but at the Edo State Colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, approved for N1 million, with zero released in the first quarter. No foreign-treatment provision exists for the governor, his deputy or any Government House office.
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