Pensioners protest budgetary omission of arrears

The National Union of Pensioners (NUP) has lamented the neglect by the Federal Government in making provisions for 42 month pension arrears for the retirees in the 2016 Appropriation Bill.

The pensioners described this as an act of negligence and vowed to fight the issue until it is fully addressed.

According to the Deputy President of the NUP, Alhaji Musa Ayuba, the union has resolved to elicit the support of the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress to fight the alleged injustice.

He made the union’s position known in Abuja during a presentation to the House Committee on Pension Matters.

He said, “Having perused the content of the 2016 Appropriation Act, the union has discovered that there is no allocation of funds in the 2016 budget to accommodate the payment of the 42 months arrears of the 33 per cent pension increase.”

Ayuba said the deliberate negligence had angered the pensioners and were poised for a showdown with the government.

The federal retirees, he stressed, hoped to achieve this with the active support of workers’ pressure groups such as the NLC and TUC.

On the issue of the 33 per cent arrears, the NUP said it wished to place on record that the approval given by the Federal Government in 2010 was 53.4 per cent.

This, it claimed, was arbitrarily scaled down to 33 per cent by a technical committee set up by the government.

A copy of the presentation, stated, “We reluctantly accepted the 33 per cent in the spirit of the fact that ‘half bread is better than none’ and not on the basis of forfeiting the balance of 20 per cent, which we shall press for after the payment of the outstanding arrears of 33 per cent.”

The union then called for an urgent intervention by relevant authorities to include the provision in the 2016 appropriation before its passage.

It said it was aware that after the preparation of the monthly pension by the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate, the payroll was submitted to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation for direct payment from the budgetary allocations maintained with the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Under this arrangement, according to the union, it is the CBN that pays the pensions to individual pensioner’s bank while the bank credits the account of the pensioner.

The union observed that in the process, if the CBN failed to release the funds on time, it would affect the monthly payment of pensions.

‎It urged the National Assembly to prevail on the CBN to release funds for prompt payment of the monthly pensions.