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……the audacity of comfort in a state that has not finished burying its dead.
A review of Borno’s 2026 budget raises uncomfortable questions about who government is actually serving.
According to a budget review by Sahara Reporters, citing the official Borno State 2026 budget published on the state government’s website, the Government House in Maiduguri plans to spend ₦900 million on furniture items.
Specifically, 60 sets of tables, 40 visitors’ chairs, and 10 cushion chairs.
Read that again. Slowly.
₦900 million. For chairs and tables. In Borno State. A state that has spent over a decade living inside the mouth of one of the deadliest insurgencies in African history.
A state where entire communities were razed, where children grew up in displacement camps, where mothers buried sons they never got to see become men.
And the Government House needs new cushion chairs.
The numbers that should haunt you
This is not just one line in a budget.
It sits inside a document full of choices and choices reveal character.
The same budget review reveals ₦800 million allocated for eight Toyota Hilux vehicles for security operations and ₦1 billion earmarked for 18 units of 500KVA generators.
And if you thought the furniture was the most jarring line, ₦150 million was set aside to feed sheep and goats kept within the Government House. A daily feeding cost of approximately ₦410,958. Every single day.
The goats at Government House in Maiduguri eat better daily than most families in Borno’s displaced communities.
Now contrast that with this, also from Sahara Reporters’ budget review: the total capital expenditure for the Borno State Primary Healthcare Development Board for the entire 2025 fiscal year stood at ₦2 billion.
The capital expenditure for the Borno State University Teaching Hospital was ₦2.7 billion.
So the state’s entire primary healthcare budget for a year is roughly what the Government House is spending on furniture, vehicles, and livestock feed combined.
The people healing from insurgency wounds, physical and psychological, are working with a fraction of what is being spent on the comfort of those governing them.
Borno is not a state in peacetime debating luxury upgrades. Boko Haram insurgency remains an active reality in parts of the state.
Communities are still rebuilding. Families are still returning to villages they fled years ago to find rubble where their homes once stood.
Children who missed years of schooling are trying to catch up in classrooms that may not have enough desks, let alone cushioned chairs.
The psychological weight of living in a post-conflict zone or a still-active conflict zone, depending on which part of Borno you are in, is not a priority.
These are people carrying trauma at a scale most of us in Lagos or Abuja cannot fully imagine and the government that is supposed to be rebuilding their dignity is budgeting ₦900 million for its own seating arrangements.
In fairness, Governor Zulum has done work that is genuinely acknowledged across party lines.
Multiple media outlets confirm that the 2026 Borno State budget of ₦890.3 billion, tagged “Budget of Sustained Recovery and Growth,” places over 61 per cent in capital expenditure, with education receiving the highest single sector allocation of ₦135 billion.
A government that puts education first in a post-conflict state deserves acknowledgement.
You can be doing good work and still be making indefensible choices; both can be true at the same time. And ₦900 million for Government House furniture in Borno, in 2026, is not it.
Good governance is not just about the big headline allocations; t is about the line items, what you spend on yourself versus what you spend on the people who elected you.
Across Nigeria, government house furniture, exotic vehicles, overseas medical trips, and luxury renovations appear in state budgets as routine items while hospitals lack equipment, schools lack teachers, and roads remain death traps.
We have been so numbed by the pattern that we only pause when a number is large enough to be scandalous.
The comfort of governance is a legitimate public expense, while the suffering of the governed is simply the context.
There are Borno families who lost everything to insurgency and are still rebuilding their lives with nothing.
There are healthcare workers in the state’s hospitals doing extraordinary work with inadequate resources.
There are children sitting on benches in under-equipped classrooms trying to reclaim an education the insurgency stole from them.
And the Government House is getting new cushion chairs and feeding goats?
These are just basic human decency.
What are your thoughts?
