The Kaduna State government has discovered over 2,484 ghost pensioners and will save N1.3billion annually as a result of the discovery, Governor Nasir El-Rufai said yesterday.
Speaking at a stakeholders’ sensitization conference on the Pension Reform Act 2014 for the North-West organised by the National Pension Commission, El-Rufai said the state government was firmly convinced that the contributory pension scheme was the right way to go.
“As we try to tackle the pension mess that we inherited, we have had to verify pensioners. We have since confirmed 2,484 ghost pensioners and we have deleted them from the pension payroll. This will save the government N1.3 billion every year.
“As you all know, ghost pensioners are impossible under a fully contributory pension scheme. Prudence demands that we reject a system that is expensive for the government, often harrowing for the pensioner and prone to so much abuse”, he said.
He said Nigeria requires a 20-year plan to be able to offset pension liabilities incurred from moribund national institutions like the Nigeria Airways and Nigeria Telecommunications (NITEL), among others.
The governor who was Director General, Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE), pointed out that Nigeria Airways alone had huge pension arrears, adding that the only way to pay such arrears was to sell the national carrier.
He said even with the sale, it was difficult to settle the pension arrears because it was huge. He also said by 2001, a step was taken to sell NITEL which according to him was valued at $500 million.
“But NITEL’s pension liability was N43 billion, it was a lot of money then in 2001 and N700 billion was the total pension liability of the Nigeria Airways.
“Our plan was that in about 20 years, Nigeria would have been done with pension liabilities. We briefed the then president of the country, Olusegun Obasanjo, and he said it was a national problem which needed to be solved. So we set up a committee headed by Kola Abiola, the committee worked for many months, and it was an excellent report, a three-volume report. We submitted the report and the federal government was happy with it.
Obasanjo accepted the report”, he said. The Director-General, National Pension Commission (PENCOM), Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, noted that effective and sustainable pension systems remained a challenge in the country as well as in most African countries.
