Osun state chairman of contributory pensioners, Mr Oyadare Gbenga on Tuesday called on the state government to speed action in offsetting pensioner’s retirement benefits put at N50 billion it is owning for the past six years.
The chairman who made the call at a programme at the state secretariat of the Nigerian Union of Pensioners office in Osogbo stated that giving contributory pensioners in the state 1.1 billion is not a big money for the amount
is a drop of water on a very hot pot that has been on fire for the past six years.
He said, “I want to tell you that 1.1 billion is just two per cent of our request, so we cannot get out of this problem in the next five years unless government borrows and we asked the government to borrow because of what the contributory pensioners have with PENSOM is over 13 trillion in Nigeria.
“We have been pressing home on our demand since November 2020 when we sort down the entrance to the secretariat, the governor gave us a committee and we presented to the government that it’s high time to hit the ground running, to do something, working extra to get out of the problem immediately. Unfortunately, since that time, what the government has been able to do is to dig their finger into the water and drop it into a very hot pot.
“That has been on fire for the past six years, the fire is burning under the pot because every month people retire and join the queue at the back and the queue is not moving at the front.
“My members in Osun state, have amputees because they have diabetes, and so they cut their legs, we have blind people, people that have hypertension who are paralyzed. Our children in the Government universities UNIOSUN are driven out because we cannot pay the fee and we have millions with the government.
“We can no longer endure it, the government must begin to talk now, about how to get out of the problem, or else we will express our annoyance because we have endured making sure we are saved from the debt that is killing the state. ”
“We should not sacrifice pensioners for the debt Osun is owning, if Osun is owing to huge debt everybody must be ready to bear the bound, for example, everything that Aregbesola took as the debt was approved by the House of Assembly.
“We are however suggesting to the government that, they should stop paying political office holders for the next six months and use their salaries to offset pensioners’ debts. It is unfortunate that Injustice has been introduced into the civil service as the law guiding it had been violated.
” The law says, three months after retirement, take your benefits and go but reverse is now the case as all monies deducted from our salaries were not remitted to the PFA, we’ve written two letters to pen com in Abuja and we petitioned Osun state government that they are owning us 50billion,” he submitted.
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