Pensioners in Abia State, on Wednesday, protested the non-payment of pensions and gratuities to them by the state government.
Under the aegis of ‘Concerned Abia Pensioners’, the pensioners said they embarked on a two-day state-wide protest to demand the payment of their 38 months of pension arrears, 20 years of gratuities, and non-harmonisation of pensions from 1998 to 2010.
The protesters, wielding placards with inscriptions like “Abia Pensioners: Non-payment of gratuity since 2020”, “Abia Pensioners: Our monthly payment for 38 months now” and “Let Governor Ikpeazu cut his security vote and pay pensioners”, among others, lamented that “We have been dehumanised and subjected to unimaginable suffering as our death toll ranges between 10 to 15 old pensioners every month.”
The coordinator of the group, Chief Emeka Okezie, said even when they were paid, it was a quarter of their salaries, stating, “We have no money to buy drugs, especially our diabetic and hypertensive pensioners.
“We have children to look after, especially those in the universities. We are retired and don’t have any work to do. We are only looking up to God and don’t know where we are heading to. We are asking the state government to help us before we all die.”
They expressed their confidence in the state Commissioner of Finance, Dr Aham Uko, who they said had, on several occasions, come to their help; they thanked him with prayers to God over his disposition to pensioners in the state.
Responding on behalf of the state government, Uko expressed his concern and that of the state government over their plight, blaming it on the prevalent “economic downturn” facing the world which Nigeria has been grappling with.
He disclosed that a further challenge with them was the discovery of 4, 422 irregular names and non-pensioners in their payroll, stating that this had been causing the state government N6bn to the fake pensioners.
“We have been removing the names to enable us to pay the real pensioners. We have to make sure we extricate them from the genuine pensioners and we cannot pay the non-pensioners,” the commissioner said.
Even as some of the pensioners publicly said they had received credit alerts on Wednesday, the commissioner pleaded with them to exercise patience as any delay in payment was as a result of the bank interchange network, assuring them that in less than two days, they would receive bank credit alerts.
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