Abia State pensioners who retired from Broadcasting Corporation of Abia (BCA), Abia State Newspapers, the Abia State Housing and Property Development Corporation, the Abia State Arts Council and the Umuahia Capital Development Authority (UCDA), under the auspices of Joint Action Committee (JAC), have cried out over their unpaid pensions running into several months.

They pleaded with Governor Alex Otti to take measures and pay the pension arrears.

In a letter to Governor Otti entitled “Save Our Soul,” signed by Chinkwe Ikenyi and Chief Ikoro John Ikoro, the pensioners said that the non-payment of their pension “has imposed an unbearable hardship on pensioners of the parastatals in question. For instance, the BCA has since November 2023, when this Administration ceased to pay their pensions, lost eight of their members to death due to lack of funds to support themselves in terms of feeding, medicals, etc.”

They said that pensioners from the Abia Newspapers have lost four people, lamenting that “the trend is common to the rest of the parastatals as they have lost various numbers of their members since the abrupt stoppage of their pensions.”

The pensioners said that the state government had given need for verification as excuse for the delay in payment, insisting: “but the truth is that there appears to be manipulations by government functionaries to deliberately delay and abort all programmes designed to ensure the verification of pensioners of those parastatals as if verification is a rocket science.

“We should recall that the governor, during his previous monthly press conferences, had told the people that the government had money to pay those pensioners and that their money was in the bank; he also said that what was needed was only to verify the pensioners in question.

“We need to stress here that some of the parastatals had earlier been successfully verified by Mrs. Charity Ukonu as directed by the government. And when it was time for payment of these parastatals, the same government that commissioned her scuttled the verification for no just cause and has continued to hold the monies of these parastatals, thereby deepening the woes of the helpless parastatals by denying them their legitimate pension entitlement.”

They accused the Accountant General of “refusal, severally, to honour the agreement she and the Head of Service (H.O.S) made with pensioners to the effect that after the Pensions Board Verification in September 2024, that the pensioners would be paid at least one month to cushion the hardship being faced by the pensioners, while the arrears would be paid in subsequent month of October, 2024.

“As if to perfect the plot to continue to hold these pensioners to ransom, the Accountant General thrice returned the Authorization Letters of these pensioners sent to her by the Pensions Board when it was almost time to pay these pensioners. This time she claimed that unless the pensioners were fully verified that she would not pay them.”

The pension stated that the state government managed to pay only four pensioners from Abia Newspapers, none from BCA, two from Arts Council, four from UCDA and 30 from Housing Corporation.

“This was followed by another publication by the government for parastatals to go for another verification with some of the parastatals not given code for the verification,” they said.

They stated that the pensioners had completed online verification and submitted their verification certificates to the Pensions Board, which has in turn submitted them to the AG’s office.

They lamented that despite the verification, they are yet to be paid, saying: “Against the background of what we think is a ding dung of disappointments designed to continue to delay the payment of pensioners, even in the midst of many of them facing life-threatening challenges of hunger, poor health induced by old age and the like and ultimately death, we passionately make the following prayers to Your Excellency.”

They want government to “facilitate the immediate completion of the verification of those parastatals that have not been given codes in order to verify them; and to ensure immediate payment of all pension arrears of these parastatals, after all, we were being paid regularly before this issue of verification came up.” (The Sun)

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