Your Excellency.
Permit me to appreciate your widely acclaimed commitment to the Borno project. You have indeed exhibited a Servant-Leadership style in leading our people. Unlike our past overlords, you have freely mingled with the poor masses and vulnerable victims of insurgency. An action-driven leadership poised on bringing lasting peace to the home of peace. Above all, your commitment to rehabilitating and restoring the dignity of our traumatised people is exemplary and commendable.
Your Excellency Sir, forgive my choosing this medium to speak to you; I intend no harm. It is the last option of communication open to me after the serial failure of formal channels. I am pained and downcast that I can’t access my monthly pension after diligently serving the state. My name is Mustapha Bukar Sabo, 63 years old and a retiree. I worked for the Borno State government from 4th Nov 1984 until March 1996 when I left and joined the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) from where I retired in 2019.
On leaving the services of Borno State government, I processed my voluntary retirement papers. The sum of N58, 760: 64 was paid as my gratuity. Starting from 2004, my monthly pension was calculated at N17, 410:56. While I was working with the FMBN I didn’t access my monthly Pension in Borno State. After retirement from FMBN, my efforts to enjoy my pension are frustrated by the Borno State Pension Office. The Pension Office insisted that I must bring a statement of account from the Bank where my salary account was domiciled then before I start enjoying the state pension. My bankers then were the Bank of The North and it has legally ceased to exist. 23 years on, the bank is now Unity Bank and all efforts to get my statement of account from the bank have been futile.
Your Excellency Sir, hinging the payment of my monthly pension to a statement account from a bank that has ceased to exist is unfair, it has never been a required document for processing pension benefits. It is a matter of common sense, indeed even of bureaucratic procedure, that documents in my file, which contains my career history, should rightly be the basis for knowing my engagement with Borno State Civil Service and certainly not a bank statement of account.
Your Excellency Sir, kudos for your good works in Borno State. Kindly intervene to enable me to draw my monthly pension which I worked for.
Mustapha Bukar Sabo can be reached via [email protected]
