Naijaonpoint
One hotel stands in the Enugu State 2026 Approved Budget twice. The construction of a five-star hotel at the International Conference Centre in Enugu is voted N5,000,000,000 under the Tourism Board and voted again at N3,000,000,000 under the Ministry of Works and Infrastructure, in one and the same 2026 Approved Budget under Governor Peter Mbah, examined by SecretsReporters.
The two entries carry the same project in near-identical words. The Tourism Board line, inside the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, reads “Construction of a five-star hotel at International Conference Centre Enugu”. The Ministry of Works and Infrastructure headquarters line reads “Construction of Five Star Hotel at International Conference Centre”. Together the two votes place N8,000,000,000 behind one hotel at one conference centre in one year. Nowhere in the 868-page budget document is any explanation offered for the doubling, and nothing in the document states whether the two lines are separate phases of one hotel or two provisions made for the same hotel.
The hotel already had a spending history before the double vote. The Tourism Board entry records a vote of N20,000,000,000 for the same hotel in 2025, and the budget’s own comparative columns show N9,729,035,732.50 spent against that vote between January and September 2025. The 2026 budget was therefore written after N9.73 billion of public money had already gone into the International Conference Centre hotel in nine months, and its answer was to vote the project twice more, under two different ministries.
Budget discipline under the Fiscal Responsibility framework rests on a simple rule of appropriation: one project is carried on one vote, under one accounting officer, so that every release can be traced to a single line and a single office answerable for it. A project voted in two ministries in the same year breaks that chain. Releases can be made against either line, expenditure can be reported under either ministry, and no single office carries the whole account of what the hotel has cost. The same discipline runs through public procurement planning, which ties each project to one procuring entity and one procurement record, so that the contract, the payments and the delivered work can be matched against each other.
What the documents do not state is as plain as what they state. No document in the 2026 cycle names the contractor building the hotel, and none states how far the construction has gone or whether any part of it has been completed. Enugu’s published implementation reports for the first two quarters of 2026 report spending ministry by ministry, and they publish project-level capital actuals only inside the Primary Healthcare and Basic Education annexes, so no published report tells the public which projects the capital releases bought. Against the N9,729,035,732.50 recorded as spent by September 2025, the records available to the public carry no completion position and no contractor’s name.
The doubled hotel sits inside a wider leisure pattern across the same two books. The Tourism Board carries “Completion of Tourist/Film Parks” at N2,500,000,000 for 2026, after N424,540,747.42 was spent by September 2025 against a 2025 vote of N1,500,000,000, and “Construction of Water and amusement park at different locations” at N3,000,000,000 for 2026, after N60,000,000 was spent by September 2025 against a 2025 vote of N4,000,000,000. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the family that holds the Tourism Board, carries N30,693,160,000 of capital votes in total for 2026.
The Ministry of Works book adds a second hotel. “Rehabilitation of Presidential Hotel, Enugu” carries a new vote of N600,000,000 for 2026. A separate Hotel Presidential reconstruction entry in the same capital schedule records N1,622,332,986 spent in 2024 and N2,436,363,700 spent by September 2025 against a revised 2025 vote of N4,000,000,000, with no 2026 provision carried on that entry.
The same Works schedule closes the pattern at the Governor’s own residence. One project line, its name truncated in the published schedule as printed, ends with the words “…and Swim Pool Governor’s lodge” and carries N100,000,000 for 2026. The documented renovation of the old Government lodge in Enugu, which held a revised vote of N270,000,000 in 2025 with N9,759,700 spent by September 2025, receives no provision at all in the 2026 budget, in the same year that a swimming pool line at the Governor’s lodge is voted N100,000,000 and one hotel at the International Conference Centre is voted twice.
Source: …Secretsreporters