Frustrations of Former Varsity Lecturers
By Joseph Onyekwere
Monday, September 11, 2006
Many retired lecturers of the University of Ibadan are still denied their pension and gratuity many years after leaving service
Segun Sowunmi, a retired professor of Mathematics of the University of Ibadan and Adebisi, his wife who is also a retired professor of Archaeology of the same university are sad. This is as a result of the agony, pains and frustrations they have been subjected to, in their efforts to get their pensions and gratuity paid by the federal government. The 72- year old lecturer retired in 1992 while his wife retired in 2004. At present, Adebisi is owed 12 months arrears of pension in addition to her gratuity while her husband's own has accumulated to 26 months.
Sowunmi told Newswatch that things have not been easy for them. According to him, their little savings have been exhausted and they are now living with the little investments they had while in active service. He said it was improper, crude and backward for the government to keep dribbling them after they had met all the requirements necessary to get their pensions paid into their accounts.
But they are not alone in this waiting game. Ayo Bamgbose, retired professor of linguistics and chairman of Body of Retired Professors, University of Ibadan is equally unhappy over the development. To get redress and ensure that the matter was adequately looked into, the retired lecturers wrote several letters to President Olusegun Obasanjo drawing his attention to their plight. But when the president responded, he said the pensions would be paid in bonds. The academics protested on the ground that they may not live to see the bonds mature or that inflation would have eaten up whatever may come out of the bonds at maturity period. "We then said that this was not good enough because quite a number of us were 80 or more, there are even people who are over 90 that before the bonds were ready, the person would have died," Bamgbose said.
According to Bamgbose, chairman of the group, the government finally agreed to pay them through the banks. The arrangement was that the banks would take the federal bonds and pay cash to the pensioners. The National Pension Commission, PENCOM, was then assigned the responsibility of supervising the payment. In April, the commission invited all the pensioners to the university campus. He said pensioners with varying degrees of infirmity and destitution were forced to come for the exercise. "Some got stranded and had to be helped financially back to their homes. A few collapsed and died. At the end of the exercise, the National Pension Commission had a database of virtually all pensioners with their bank addresses and account numbers," he said.
A month later, the pensioners were made to troop back to the campus to collect a month's pension despite the fact that PENCOM had all the data required to pay into their accounts. The payment drama continued in August when PENCOM made a public announcement that it wanted to cross-check its database of last April. The requirements were that each pensioner was to download a form, fill it with information contained in pensioner verification forms and return it to Abuja. Bamgbose said they complied hastily with this directive believing that it will end their hassles. About a 100 of the pensioners were later asked to go to Lagos for their cheques after which one of the pensioners who must have been probably seen on the television was allegedly killed by armed robbers. Newswatch could not confirm the identity of the victim. According to him, the rest of the pensioners were asked to wait for the announcement to the effect that their money had been paid into the bank only to hear that Ibrahim Dakwambo, the accountant-general of the federation had directed that all the pensioners will have to go to Ibadan from all over the federation and queue for cheques. "Why does he want to multiply our sufferings? We have suffered enough and so want the money to be paid into our accounts," he said.
Newswatch gathered that those who retired before 1992 were being paid through National University Commission, NUC, while those who retired afterwards had their pensions insured in National Insurance Commission, NICON. But because the federal government was not paying premium to NICON, it refused to pay pensioners. This situation made the pension debt to run into millions of naira. As a result, the university authorities were left with the option of paying those who retired before 1992 and living out post-1992 retirees or paying pre-1992 retirees half of their money while giving a little to post-1992 retirees. The institution settled for the latter until September 2002 when it could no longer do so. So, those who retired after 2002 are yet to receive a dime.
Solomon Adeyi, deputy bursar, University of Ibadan told Newswatch that the minister of finance said all retirees would be paid before the end of September. As a result, the university started to verify files of the retirees from August 6 and ended it on September 2. He said they merged the files with PENCOM and submitted the list of 884 names in the first batch. Later, additional 224 names were sent in the second batch. Yet nothing was done. Instead, PENCOM went to the campus and verified the retirees on their own by asking them to queue up and their photographs were taken. "PENCOM was to verify and capture the bio-data of all the retirees and sent the list to the office of the accountant-general," he said. He said the reason for the choice of that method of payment by the government was unclear to them.
When Newswatch visited the office of the accountant-general in Abuja last week, he was not unavailable for comments. But one of his aides told Newswatch that they were unaware of the retired lecturers' protest.
Additional report by Anza Phillips
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