Budgets are often treated as dry rituals – pages of figures read in a hushed chamber and quickly forgotten. Yet every serious budget is a political and moral document. It reveals what a government truly values and the kind of future it is willing to finance. Kano’s proposed 2026 “Budget of Infrastructure, Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development” is exactly that: an attempt to turn recent hardship into a pathway for genuine transformation.
In 2024, Kano, like much of Nigeria, struggled with economic distress, soaring food prices and rising social anger. The 2025 fiscal year brought some relief as Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s administration stabilised key sectors and delivered visible interventions in education, healthcare, infrastructure, security and social protection. By the end of that year, the government could credibly claim that most of its campaign blueprint was already being implemented and that the 2025 budget was performing strongly. That track record – not just rhetoric, but execution – is the runway on which the 2026 ambitions hope to take off.
At about ₦1.368 trillion, the scale of the 2026 budget is striking, but its structure is even more telling. Roughly two-thirds of total spending is earmarked for capital projects, and one-third for recurrent costs – a capital-to-recurrent ratio of about 68:32. In a political culture where salaries and overheads often swallow development, that ratio is a deliberate statement of intent. It signals a choice to build classrooms, hospitals, roads and systems rather than simply keep the machinery of government idling.
Three sectors dominate the capital allocations: education, health and infrastructure. Education is proposed to receive about 30 per cent of total spending, health 16 per cent and infrastructure 25 per cent. That distribution embodies a clear theory of change: invest in people, keep them healthy, and connect them through roads, power and urban renewal to markets and opportunities. Human capital, human security, and enabling infrastructure are treated as a single, reinforcing agenda, not three disconnected silos.
The emphasis on education did not begin in 2026. In 2025, Kano declared a sector-wide state of emergency and backed it with a historic share of the budget. Resources were invested in rehabilitating schools, funding free basic education, improving feeding in boarding schools, expanding scholarships, and reviving skill-acquisition centres. Tertiary reforms – including major tuition waivers and the establishment of Kano State Polytechnic, Gaya – opened fresh pathways for young people. Kano’s emergence at the top of the 2025 NECO performance table was more than a bragging right; it showed that sustained, focused investment can move the needle on outcomes.
The 2026 allocation to education is therefore a continuation, not a flourish. If realised in practice, it could move Kano from being a state that merely funds education to one defined by what its schools and colleges produce: literate, employable, digitally aware young people – including girls – whose skills match the demands of a modern economy. But that will require more than new buildings. It demands motivated teachers, equipped laboratories and technical colleges, stronger school governance and data that tracks whether children are actually learning, not just whether they are enrolled.
Health tells a similar story. In 2025, a significant share of the budget went toward upgrading primary healthcare centres, expanding contributory health insurance for vulnerable groups, and launching free-care schemes, including maternal services. Rising insurance enrolment signalled a shift away from a system designed for the urban and the well-connected. Maintaining a strong health allocation in 2026 indicates that the sector is being treated as a foundation of productivity and dignity, not an afterthought to be adjusted when money is tight.
Infrastructure is the most visible face of the administration’s ambition. Recent spending on roads, public buildings, power and urban renewal has begun to change the physical texture of the state: rehabilitated roads, renovated government offices, additional transformers and solar-powered traffic lights and streetlights in major towns. Elevating infrastructure to a quarter of the total budget turns these efforts from scattered projects into a more coherent reshaping of space. The focus on completing ongoing works and rolling out mass-housing schemes hints at a commitment to livable communities, not just prestige projects. Linking this infrastructure push to a planned economic city and an SME ecosystem along the AKK gas pipeline corridor shows how today’s spending is tied to tomorrow’s industrial opportunities.
Beyond the “big three” sectors, the 2026 budget seeks to consolidate gains in agriculture, environment, transport, and women and youth development. Irrigation schemes, fertiliser support and small dams aim to move farmers away from the mercy of rainfall towards more predictable production. Climate-change policies, erosion-control works, mechanised street cleaning and tree-planting recognise that an urbanising, Sahel-edge state must treat the environment as hard economics. A new transport policy, a metropolitan transport authority and the introduction of electric tricycles point towards cleaner mobility and new livelihoods for young people.
The human face of all this is most clearly seen in women’s and youth programmes and in efforts to rebuild institutional trust. Grants, vocational training, livestock entrepreneurship schemes for women and start-up support for graduates are early attempts to turn a demographic bulge into a demographic dividend. Clearing long-standing gratuity arrears and councillors’ entitlements, investing in digital governance and strengthening community-based security structures sends a simple message: development is impossible without institutions that keep their promises and protect communities.
Yet a reflective reading of Kano 2026 must confront a familiar Nigerian dilemma: the gap between plans and reality. Without strong preparation, transparent procurement and disciplined supervision, even the best-designed capital budgets can degenerate into white elephants. A 68:32 capital-to-recurrent ratio is admirable only if the “capital” is genuinely productive – schools completed and staffed, hospitals equipped and functional, roads finished and maintained.
This is where institutions beyond the executive become decisive. The House of Assembly must move beyond perfunctory approval to rigorous oversight. Citizens, civil society, the media and traditional authorities must insist that contractors and officials treat public resources as sacred, not as spoils. The Kwankwasiyya ideals of discipline, humility and people-centred governance will be tested not in speeches but on project sites, in classrooms, clinics and markets.
Kano stands at an inflexion point. The 2026 budget is both the consolidation of promises made in 2023 and a bridge to the kind of state Kano must become beyond 2027: educated, healthy, productive, inclusive and environmentally resilient. “Budgeting for transformation” is therefore more than a phrase. It is an invitation to lawmakers to legislate with conscience, to public servants to implement with integrity, to contractors to deliver with professionalism, and to citizens to hold everyone to account. If that invitation is honoured, the 2026 budget will not simply close a fiscal year; it will open a new chapter in Kano’s story, one in which the state begins, visibly and measurably, to look like the investments made in its people.
Dr Ukachukwu, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Abuja.
.
