The Centre for Pension Rights Advocacy has called on the Federal Government to provide funds to pay the pension benefits of its retirees and those who are about to retire.
The Executive Director, CPRA, Ivor Takor, said that President Muhammadu Buhari had shown that he had interest in the welfare of public servants at the federal, state and local government levels.
He observed that on assumption of office, Buhari addressed the non-payment of salaries in the states most of which owed their workers as much as seven months’ salaries.
Takor noted that the Federal Government gave the state governments bailout funds to enable them to pay the backlog of salaries.
He said, “The bailout of these categories of public servants took the form of immediate remittance into the Retirement Savings Accounts of federal public servants, all the arrears of pension contributions of the employees and their employers.
“Secondly, the government should make sufficient payment into the Retirement Benefits Bond Redemption Fund Account in the Central Bank of Nigeria to ensure that retiring federal public servants are paid their retirement benefits as at when due in line with the objectives of the Contributory Pension Scheme.”
Takor made reference to story in July, which revealed that the Federal Government had not been remitting the pension contributions of most federal public servants into their RSAs under the CPS since October 2015.
The group said the Federal Government should not be a Santa Claus by paying the outstanding salaries of states government workers, but failing in its legal and moral obligations to its own employees.
Takor urged the Federal Government to show the moral and political will to implement the Contributory Pension Scheme, which from a deficit N2tn, had been able to accumulate an investable fund of about N5tn, by complying with the provisions of the Pension Reform Act, 2014.
