IT is no news that pensioners in the country are living from hand to mouth and living each day at a time. The reason is not far to seek. Many of them retired from their jobs in the hope that the country they had served would take care of them in their retirement but this had turned out to be a mirage. Governments, past and present, have always failed in this regard, leaving most pensioners to their fate. From ex-military men to retired civil servants, among others, all over the country, it is always a series of sad tales of mutual suffering being shared any time they converge for their monthly or periodical meetings.
14 years of struggle and pain
One group of pensioners suffering in their years of retirement is the former staff of the defunct Nigeria Airways. The lucky ones in this group were those based in Europe and America; they got paid their full entitlements 14 years ago after the liquidation of the company. However, those in Nigeria, including those in the West Coast have been subjected to unimaginable psychological torture by the various governments in the saddle since then.
Of the four governments the country has had since the demise of the airline in 2003/2004,it was only the government of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua that gave the abandoned workers respite by paying them five years out of the 20 years the government agreed to pay.
Unfortunately, the Obasanjo government under whose tenure the airline was liquidated only took interest in the welfare of foreign workers but ignored its own citizens. The Goodluck Jonathan government which proceeded after the demise of Yar’Adua also failed to continue from where the Yar’Adua government from which it shot off stopped, leaving the pensioners to continue their suffering and hoping for a miracle.
While some of these ex-staff of the defunct airline have survived all these unfortunate situations some of them have not been that lucky. Over 1,000 were reported to have since died unable to enjoy the fruits of their labour in retirement.
Like most of the former airline workers, a former staff who would like to be identified simply as Madam Justina, said she was barely 45 years old when the airline was liquidated but now at the age of 60, the suffering that she and her children had experienced could only be imagined.
Apart from losing her husband to cancer, Madam Justina said two of her children had to drop out of school due to lack of funds. She was also forced to relocate to her village in Ondo State with other members of her family when she could no longer pay their house rents.
Madam Justina who was full of condemnation for the Obasanjo administration for failing to pay ex-staffers of the airline wondered why succeeding governments had chosen to enjoy seeing their citizens suffer.
A visit to Skycatering Office, the centre for a recent verification exercise and the payment for the ex-Nigeria Airways workers should ordinarily be a pleasant one, if the exercise was done with a human face. On the contrary, the looks and appearances of the pensioners were signposts of suffering and poverty, coupled with years of psychological torture. Many of the workers who used to be very active have now become ghosts of their former selves. The attractive and pretty faces of those young ladies on board flights then had become withered.
Many of them were in wheelchairs, some on crutches. Some of them who had become blind were led around by their family members. The verification was an agonising exercise for most of them as it was largely uncoordinated, making things all the more stressful for the already weak and sick.
For the duration of the exercise, many of the workers slept in the open space within the venue of the exercise because they could not afford to go home and return to continue the exercise.
Madam Eunice Nwanosike was the first Nigeria Airways female worker and she will be 90 years old in March next year. According to her, she joined the airline in 1956 when it was British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). Brandishing her employment letter and identification card issued to her in 1956, the former beauty, who has now succumbed to old age as she held on to her walking stick on the chair she sat, told Sunday Tribune how she enjoyed her days in the defunct national carrier until she was retired in 1984. She is a lucky one among many of her colleagues.
“I joined Nigeria Airways on September 1, 1956. I was born in 1929. I retired in 1984,” she said, explaining that “when the war started in 1967, I went back to Enugu. Three years after the war, we were recalled to Nigeria Airways and I went back to the printing press where I was. I feel fulfilled. My son is a medical doctor and I have children who took care of me and they are still taking care of me. I feel very happy today. I thank God for sparing my life to collect my money. I would have died long time ago but God spared my life.
“God is angry with Nigeria because of what our leaders did to this airline and our country. You can imagine that this airline employed over 6, 000 people and you can imagine someone who was not in his right senses waking up one day to kill an airline without provision for workers’ benefits. What we asked for was legitimate. We worked for it. We were humiliated and it took over 15 years to give us what rightly belonged to us,” she said.
Some of the other former airways staffers who spoke with Sunday Tribune were bitter. Mr Jide Alao is one of them. He was close to tears as he narrated how he did not only lose his first son to malaria, his other children were also thrown out of their schools for inability to pay their fees. Alao, like many other former workers, described Nigeria as a country which does not reward hard work.
Fifteen years after the liquidation of the Nigeria Airways, the former staffers are still waiting for entitlements that are taking forever to come. Though many had died, those still alive are hoping and praying that one day, very soon, they would get their dues before they die.
and then