Pensioners in Ogun State on Tuesday rejected a N500 million sum from the Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, to offset the backlog of their unpaid gratuity, describing it as “unacceptable.”
The payment of the backlog is scheduled to begin from January 2021.
The pensioners put the cumulative sum of their outstanding gratuity at N68 billion and noted it would take 34 years to clear it going by Governor Abiodun’s proposal.
Eko Trust recalls that the organised labour had last Friday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the state government over the trade dispute.
As part of the MoU, the state government agreed to earmark N500m on a quarterly basis for the clearance of the gratuity, with payment commencing in January 2021.
But the pensioners rejected the offer and staged a protest against it as well as the disputed Pension Reform Bill, and non-implementation of a 33.4 percent pension increase, among others.
The old, placard-carrying protesters took to the streets from their Secretariat along Abiola Way, Abeokuta, singing solidarity songs to express their displeasure with the government policies.
The Ogun State Chairman of the Nigeria Union of Pensioners (NUP), Waheed Oloyede told journalists that the union had to resort to the protest following the government’s “elusiveness and unfulfilled promises” on the pensioners’ welfare.
Oloyede said the union had rejected the government’s proposal on the gratuity payment and recommended a monthly release of, at least, N1bn for the clearing of the outstanding gratuity.
Oloyede said, “It is very disheartening that the majority of pensioners are on N5,000 monthly pension in Ogun State, an amount not enough to feed the dogs of an elite in one day.
“We do not deserve this worst humiliation from the unconcerned politicians, who will spend only a few years in office, take full pay and disengage with mouth-watering severance allowances.”
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