By Secrets Reporters
N1,734,000,000. That is what Bayelsa State’s approved 2026 budget gives Government House for local travel and transport, others, one vote for trips inside Nigeria by the Governor and the officials around him. It is the single largest overhead item in the Government House budget, and it is fifteen times what the same Government House spent on all its capital projects in the whole of the first half of the year.
Governor Douye Diri proposed this budget, signed it into law and answers for every line in it. His Government House, administrative code 011100100100, carries a total of N8,409,733,012.86 for 2026. Personnel costs take N409,733,012.86 of it. The rest is running cost and capital: N5,000,000,000 approved for overhead and N3,000,000,000 approved for capital expenditure. That is what SecretsReporters review of the state’s published 2026 budget and its first and second quarter performance reports establishes.
Inside the overhead vote sits the travel bill. The local travel vote stands beside international travel and transport, others, at N800,000,000, a combined N2,534,000,000 voted for moving the Governor and his retinue around Nigeria and abroad. Motor vehicle fuel cost adds N925,190,000, a vote that stood at N30,000,000 in the 2025 budget. Travel and fuel together come to N3,459,190,000, which is 69.2 per cent of the entire Government House overhead vote.
The budget carries smaller named votes beside them. Honorarium and sitting allowance takes N39,100,000. Refreshment and meals takes N24,000,000. Maintenance of aircrafts takes N5,400,000.
What the money did in the first half of the year is only partly visible. Between January and June 2026, Government House spent N1,877,201,202.25 of its total vote, a performance of 22.3 per cent. Overhead spending reached N1,563,523,619.27, or 31.3 per cent of the N5 billion approved. Capital spending reached N115,242,765.08, or 3.8 per cent of the N3 billion approved. The capital vote that performed slowest holds no building or construction project at all: N2,560,000,000 of it is a single item for anniversaries and celebrations, and the remaining N440,000,000 is for the purchase of fixed assets.
How much of the travel and fuel money was actually spent in the first half of the year, the published records do not say. Bayelsa State’s quarterly performance reports publish actual spending only at the level of the office and the broad economic category, personnel, overhead and capital. No published record shows what was spent on the local travel vote, the international travel vote or the motor vehicle fuel vote between January and June. The approvals are published item by item; the spending beneath them is not.
Two offices that carry protocol and ceremonial spending in other states do not exist in Bayelsa’s 2026 records at all. There is no Protocol office and no Chief of Staff office standing as a separate budget entity anywhere in the approved budget. The ceremonial spending in the Governor’s orbit sits inside Government House itself, in the same vote that carries the travel bill, and on the capital side it stands there in plain print: the largest single item in the Government House capital vote is anniversaries and celebrations.
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