Stories by Ebere Nworji
Police retirees under the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), have urged federal government to fulfil its promise of setting up special gratuity scheme to enhance retirement benefits of retired police officers.
The retirees, also lamented that the recent reversal of the template used to calculate pension payments by the National Pension Commission (PenCom) has further caused some negative issues in the system.
The retired police officers, in a recent statement made available to THISDAY, said the federal government, had set up a tripartite committee made up of the Acting Director-General, of PenCom, Mrs Aisha Dahir-Umar and her team; a police team headed by a Deputy Inspector-General of Police and NPF Pensions team, to address the agitations by police retirees to exit the CPS two years ago, due to low pension benefits at retirement.
The retirees, under the aegis of Association of Retired Police Officers under the contributory Pension Scheme(CPS) in the statement signed by its spokesman Ismail Adekunle, said the committee met to discuss the low pension payment for retired police officers and agreed with PenCom to address issue.
According to him, they resolved in a memorandum of understanding that the federal government should approve a special gratuity for the police so that when they retire, the lump sum of their total pension would not be taken from their account and the balance would be channelled as monthly programmed withdrawal, which would make their pay out more quantitative. They said the federal government should consider the gratuity in form of 300 per cent of a police salary which is the approximate that used to be the gratuity.
Adekunle, said to the surprise of the retired officers, nothing had been done to this effect, saying instead the police retirees were being owed their monthly pension benefits.
He attributed the low monthly pension benefits due to them to lingering low salary scale, arguing that their low salary scale compared to their counterparts in government ministries and agencies translated to low pension benefits, a situation which he said has left them and their families in poverty and penury.
Just last week, the police pensioners in a statement had alleged that there was fraud going on in their pension system, urging the federal government to pay their accrued rights.
