Checking Untimely Retirement In Rivers

Some civil servants in Rivers State are currently on massive voluntary retirement from service to beat
the June 2022 deadline for the implementation of the Defined Benefit Scheme (DBS) also known as the old pension scheme. Given the development, the state Director-General of the Pension Board, Ijeoma Samuel, advised the workers against rushing for discretionary retirement.
In a goodwill message at the 2022 Rivers State Civil Service New Year Thanksgiving/Dedication Service held recently at the Ministry of Justice hall in Port Harcourt, Samuel persuaded the civil servants to expect better days ahead and be productive to justify the government’s gigantic investments in them.
She revealed Rivers State Government’s plan to appraise and  review the state pension law to ameliorate the challenges of civil servants. According to her, the law, when amended, would cover civil servants who would retire between June 2022 and 2025. By implication, the current mass retirement will push to the limit the finances of the state, since no budgetary provision may have been made for such venture.
The proposed review of the state pension law is indeed a laudable initiative. This will take in more civil servants under the DBS and give ample time for the implementation of the contributory scheme which has not been enforced since it was enacted. With this decision, we beseech civil servants in the state who are still contemplating leaving the service to have a rethink.
We advise the government to expedite action on the bill for the amendment of the law by forwarding it to the State House of Assembly for passage. No doubt, the amendment of the contributory pension scheme law will undertake the challenge being faced by civil servants in the state who have long retired under the law. We also impel quick enforcement of the amended law to stem untimely retirement from the service.
With a bloated civil service of more than 50,000 workforce and a growing army of pensioners, Governor Nyesom Wike inherited a pension’s problem that had persisted before 2007. The governor introduced a reformed scheme to tackle the situation. Pensions payment in Rivers State, like in many states, has been a thorny issue, with most of the affected retired workers going for months of unpaid pensions until the Governor Wike assumed office and cleared the arrears owed by his predecessor, Chibuike Amaechi, in 2015.
One major attraction in public service, despite its poor remuneration package, is the benefit of receiving a pension and a gratuity after retirement. But over the years, such a prospect has become problematic and uncertain in Nigeria. And this has worsened the woes of retired civil servants. It was in a bid to move beyond this tragic situation that the Pension Reforms Act of 2004 was enacted.
The new law was designed to address the failures of the old scheme — DBS. In its place, the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) was introduced wherein both the government and the workers are to save up a given amount of their earnings towards building up an accumulated funds reserve which the worker can fall back on after retirement.
But many workers dread the CPS option not only in Rivers State but across the nation because they lack adequate understanding of its workings coupled with the fact that it is successfully operated by only a few states. Indeed, in places where the scheme is successful, on retirement, the states would have computed the emoluments of the beneficiaries and disburse them to pension funds administrators (PFAs) without delay.
The significant shortfall in the number of eligible subscribers to the CPS calls for the need for operators to embark on mass education and awareness creation to reverse the prevailing negative attitude towards it. The scheme, which would be 18 years in a few months in Nigeria (June 2004 – 2022), is yet to be adopted wholeheartedly by several employers and their employees. Many state governments and their workers lack faith in the scheme to date.
Available statistics from the National Pension Commission (PenCom) estimated Nigeria’s working population at 70 million, out of which, about 45 million work in the formal sector that are eligible contributors to the CPS. However, only 9.4 million have keyed into the CPS scheme, meaning that over 40 million formal sector workers are outside pension coverage.
Among the informal sector workers, most of who are eligible contributors to the Micro Pension Scheme (MPS), recent statistics released by PenCom said only 73 million have registered in the MPS. Pension sector analysts said this goes to show the long gap between eligible contributors who are already captured in both the CPS and the MPS and those outside them.
The provisions of the Pension Act demands that the government issues bonds in favour of retired workers, which will be redeemed to the PFAs which will credit the same to the accounts of the individual staff. Therefore, the non-remittance of the deductions of staff is a clear breach of the provisions of the Pension Reforms Act and that perhaps explains why pension liabilities in the country today run into hundreds of billions of Naira, making it undesirable.
Rivers State has no reason to be found in that category. Beyond amending the pension law, we exhort the Rivers State Government to keep faith in its obligations to retirees. While we highly commend the governor for the regular payment of salaries and monthly pensions, which is critical to workers’ welfare, it is only fair and just to enlist more retirees on the monthly payroll, pay gratuities and other benefits to soothe the nerves of retired persons, especially after the workers had been faithful in making appropriate contributions to the state while in active service.