ARFESPON  Challenges PTAD on Pension Benefit Payment

Ebere Nwoji

A group of Pensioners under the aegis of Association of Retired  Federal Senior Public Officers of Nigeria (ARFESPON), has challenged the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD), to openly  defend the authenticity of the current benefit payment table it uses in paying pensioners’ monthly benefits before its supervising ministry and Chairman Salary and wages Commission. 

ARFESPON also urged all pensioners under the Defined Pension Benefit scheme managed by PTAD to stand up and condemn  what it called illegal and internally generated salary payment table currently used by PTAD in payment of their monthly benefits saying it was  different from the table of benefit payment approved by the Salaries and wages Commission.

Chairman Lagos Chapter of ARFESPON, Chief Olufemi Odewabi, who stated this at the 2024 inaugural meeting of the group in Lagos, urged other group of pensioners to join in the call to salvage  pensioners from the undeserved ill treatment meted to them by PTAD.

He lamented that the agency and its workforce have conspired to shortchange the pensioners in payment of their retirement benefits  but that no body was there to call them to order not even the supervisory ministry.

Odewabi, in his new year message reacted to comments by PTAD spokesperson, Mr Gbenga Ajayi in which in his response to THISDAY’s enquiries on the alleged usage of the agency’s own wage scale in payment of pensioners’ benefits  in place of approved table by salaries and Wages Commission, Ajayi said it was a lie, insisting that what the agency uses in paying pensioners’ benefit was table approved by the salaries and wages Commission.

But in a swift reaction to this at the meeting , the ARFESPON Chairman   said PTAD and its spokesperson should come up in the open in defence  of what the pensioners were saying if it claimed  that it was not true. 

He showcased two different tabulated documents to the journalists present at the meeting explaining that one was approved table by the salaries and wages commission while the other one was a personal scale developed by PTAD based on which it pays the pensioners’ benefits.