It is pathetic to see senior citizens who had retired honourably from public services queue up in open places under the sun, for verification purposes. This experience applies to both pensioners under the federal and state civil services. In the process of queueing for several hours and days to be ‘captured in biometric exercise,’ those of them with health challenges such as diabetes, prostate enlargement and other age-related ailments, often urinate in their dress or collapse from tiredness.
The purpose of being invited from their various places of abode to the venues for the verification and ‘capturing exercise’, is to ensure that dead and ‘ghost’ pensioners were not being paid. It is true that payroll fraud features in the pensions scheme, such that steps must be taken to check leakages in pensions payroll. Yet, the entire civil service is associated with endemic financial malfeasance. Politicians claim that civil servants are clever manipulators of records, not only financial ones.
There may be a wrong assumption that retirees are generally well-off, capable of enjoying some comfort and ease after retirement. Neither is it true that retirees usually have some investments or alternative income-yielding engagements. This assumption is not always true. Rather, the pathetic experience of retirees causes serving civil servants to learn the lesson of how not to become destitute after retirement. So, there is the moral task of helping themselves in whichever ways they can, before old age visits them.
Hardly would any honest Nigerian doubt the fact that salaries of civil servants rarely suffice for them, especially in view of a steadily diminishing value of the naira. A research work of less than five years ago indicated that more than 65 percent of civil servants would borrow some money before the next pay. Many would find some other engagements to augment their salaries.
Another serious research covering pensioners in the past 12 years indicated that more than 25percent of retirees lived in rented houses after retirement. The situation was particularly worse with junior civil servants, including the fact that the N30,000 minimum wage policy did not improve the sad conditions of the average civil servant. What would emerge clear with anyone doing unbiased research into the conditions of civil servants, is the fact that sensible ones help themselves in many ways, rather than depend on ‘salaries that go nowhere’.
The unfortunate situation is that honest and conscientious civil servants usually retire into a life of needs and silent agonies. Obviously, there are smart and clever ones, including some who hold multiple jobs, but it would be unfair to generalise the practice. Those who took loans to be able to build houses they would retire into, continue to pay off such loans, with hardly anything left from pensions, for other needs. Among political connections or appointments.
The really sad aspect of the plight of retirees is the absence of a pre-retirement programme which would help to reduce the pathetic conditions of a larger percentage of pensioners. A pre-retirement programme which should start about one year before retirement would include orientations covering investment opportunities, health, adjustment into a life of retirement and everything that would make a retiree not regret having been a public servant. Would it not be a morale booster if retirees are given some welfare package they cherish in the future?
What we find quite common in the public sector is the mean practice of undermining the career and reputation of colleagues, by various means. Truly, the in-fighting and animosities in the public service sector can best be known and appreciated by those who had experienced the stark reality of that plight. Unfortunately, some chief executives and heads of units do encourage and foster bad blood in work places, whereby people are run down by their colleagues. Rat race for advancement is common in work places.
Whatever the lapses and individual orientations of public servants, retirement marks the close of active working life, and the beginning of a new and different phase of life. Challenges peculiar to retirees include failing health, whose nature and degree vary according to individuals. Others are loneliness, especially for those bereaved and whose children are grown and live on their own; how to spend leisure hours effectively, and financial strains, especially for those who depend solely on their meager pensions.
The fair deals being sought for retirees, apart from hosting parties for them, would include the following: What if one year before retirement, necessary documentations, data and processes are put in place, so that issues about benefits, gratuities, etc., are made ready for payment within three months after retirement? A situation where a worker gets a letter of retirement three months to the event cannot be described as fair. Similarly, the practice of ‘contract appointment’ after retirement has been applied in such controversial manner that smacks of favouritism.
Those who are out of service and out of office are often given the impression of non-appreciation of their past noble sacrifices. This shows in the inexplicable delays in the payment of gratuities and other terminal benefits. In some cases, those occupying official quarters are forced out in humiliating manners. There is hardly equity and sameness in the way retirees are treated, creating the impression of double standards.
From 2011, the fate of retirees has been sad and pathetic, such that neither gratuity nor pension comes several months after retirement. Some start getting their pensions more than three months after retirement while gratuity can remain for several years before being paid. It would be unfair to place old and feeble retirees in stressful and anxiety-ladden situations. Families of those who died before payment of their gratuities have had sad stories to tell.

Dr Amirize is a retired lecturer in the Rivers State
University, Port Harcourt.