Retired police officers and men on Thursday went on a peaceful protest in Ibadan, Oyo State, over the contributory pension scheme lumped on them by the federal government.
They said that the kind of pension scheme they had been saddled with has created a disparity between them and other law enforcement agencies as well as some federal government bodies, which were either exempted or exited from it.
At the protest, which took off from the pensioners’ office at the police headquarters to several media houses in the capital city, the retirees beseeched the federal government to also exit them from the contributory pension scheme so that they would be able to enjoy the benefits of pension befitting them that served the nation meritoriously for 35 years.
They carried placards which bore inscriptions such as ‘We are tired of PENCOM,’ ‘Save us from PENCOM slavery,’ ‘Pension increase is our right,’ among others.
Speaking at the protest, the chairman of Police Retirees Under Contributory Pension Scheme, Oyo State chapter, Benjamin Akande, a retired Chief Superintendent of Police, decried the situation whereby retired officers under contributory pension scheme were being made to suffer after 35 years of service to their fatherland.
He told the Nigerian Tribune: “The scheme is about 14 years now and an officer who retired 14 years ago is taking less than N30,000, which is the minimum for pensioners.
“In our own set, that is contributory pensioners, an Assistant Superintendent of Police is being given N18,000, whereas, in the old scheme, that is the Defined Benefit Scheme, the minimum pension is N30,000.
“A Deputy Superintendent of Police gets N35,000 monthly, while another DSP gets N42,000, which even indicates disparity in payment.
“In 2010, there was a general increase after a presidential technical committee met to decide increase for pensioners, and approved 33 per cent. Up till now that we are protesting, it has not been implemented.”
He spoke of the national protest held by the retirees in the Federal Capital Territory Abuja on April 28, whereby the Senate asked the Inspector General of Police to propose a bill to exit the police from the contributory pension scheme, but said that the bill had not been presented three months after.
“It is only in the police that we have three kinds of pensioners which do not make for cohesion.
“We have those in Defined Benefit Scheme, those of us under Contributory Pension Scheme and the NPF Pension. It is not happening in any other sector as the military and the DSS were exited from the contributory pension scheme.
“The question we are asking: if the system is good, why were they exited? But nobody has been able to answer the question. If the contributory pension scheme is good, why did they remove the military, the DSS? The judiciary, FIRS were exempted from the beginning,” he said.
CSP Akande also made reference to the Pension Reform Act 2014 as “a conspiracy against retired police officers to divert our hard-earned benefits.
“It is unthinkable that police officers who enlisted in the Nigeria Police Force under Defined Benefits Scheme and had served this nation up to pensionable years before the introduction of the contributory pension scheme, could be coerced into a system that has robbed them of their entitlements which their counterparts in other agencies like the military and DSS are still enjoying.”
He added: “We want the federal government, particularly President Muhammadu Buhari, to remove us from contributory pension scheme for us to get good payment as monthly pensions like others.”
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