Opinion: FG: Keeping Faith with Obligations to Pensioners By – AMINU WADA
For thousands of retired civil servants, post-retirement life often remains traumatic, as they have to endure the grotesque experience of years of unpaid gratuities and pensions. File Photo: Aged Pensioners waiting for their entitlement The situation, naturally, results in the disruption of post-service plans as well as grinding hardship which, in more than a few cases, have resulted in fatalities. To address the tragic situation, the Pensions Reforms Act 2004 was enacted.
The legislation was conceived to remedy the flaw of the old Defined Benefit Scheme (DBS) through the introduction of the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), which demands that both the government and the civil servants save up a given amount of their earnings towards building an accumulated deposit reserve on which the worker can fall on after retirement. Savannah Sugar:
FG concludes verification, set to pay former workers While the National Pension Commission (PenCom), which grew out of the legislation has helped grow the pension funds as well as managed same with some level of prudence, it is yet to fully resolve the issues around pension payments, as various categories of civil servants found no comfort on account of the complications occasioned by the failure to link the old scheme to the CPS. Even after that seemed to have been done, the Federal Government and many state governments neglected to remit sums deducted from workers’ salaries to Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs). This ensured that the current administration of President Muhammadu Buhari inherited a huge baggage of decades-long pensions and gratuities backlog.
The situation was not helped by the fact that the administration came into office when the economy was on choppy waters, eventually leading to recession from which the country has since exited. Remarkably, the Federal Government, despite continued revenue shortfall, in 2018, made attempts to alleviate the conditions of pensioners. Recently, the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed disclosed that the Ministry of Finance, through Pencom, paid the sum of N54 billion to settle outstanding pension arrears from 2014, 2015 and 2016, as well as paying pensions claims up to March 2017. In addition, the ministry also paid over 2,000 staff of the defunct national carrier, Nigeria Airways Limited. The payment was sequel to the outcome of the Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA). Beneficiaries of the Federal Government to resolve the pension imbroglio also include former workers of the privatized National Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) and those of its offshoot, Mtel, who have been waiting to be paid for 12 years.
Currently, a total of 9,215 former workers of the telecommunications company are being paid monthly. Buhari vs Atiku: Nobody will stop PDP from going to court – Secondus This followed the verification exercise carried out by the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD), which was mandated to verify and enrol eligible pensioners for the purpose of monthly pension payment in conformity with the Pension Reform Act of 2014. In October 2017, over N571million was paid in gratuity and arrears to 174 Biafra War Affected Retired Police Officers (WARPRO).
While these steps have brought much-needed relief to the beneficiaries, there is still more to be done to ensure a more pleasant post-retirement life for those not yet impacted. Also in 2018, the Federal Government paid off other inherited liabilities and debts, which include $5.4 billion to states in form of the Paris club over deductions, which helped states address salary and pension arrears; $6.8 billion in Joint Venture (JV) cash call, N1.9trillion in Contractor/Export Expansion Grant (EEG) and N488 billion as refund to states for roads. Vanguard
Wada, a public affairs commentator, is resident in Abuja
