NATIONAL RAPE OF RETIRED PATRIOTS! 20032006

In almost every family within our country today, you will find the endangered specie of retired patriots.  These are fellow countrymen, who often have attained the prime age of 50 years, while several others have succeeded, thanks to providence, to attain many more years inspite of the odds!  The characteristic gaunt and often timid postures of these patriots belie their committed contributions to our national wealth during a lifetime of loyal public service in the different departments of federal and state machinery including the security forces, health, education, transportation and industrial parastatals.  The Bible says that you reap what you sow, but it is difficult to see how this truism relates to the endangered specie under reference, as most of these noble Nigerians served our country in an era when work was a noble preoccupation and honesty and integrity were assumed in the substrata of public service. Civil servants throughout Nigeria were motivated to put in their best by virtue of their contract with the government to continue to provide them with a realistic living wage and the promise to provide reasonable support for the sustenance of dignity of life when the time comes when they are too old to work.

In retrospect, the government kept its side of this bargain for as long as the value of wages remained adequate for the lifestyle commensurate with each job class.  The bottom started falling off when the system of reward tilted in favour of ethnic balancing in place of merit and the gradual devaluation of the naira which led to the rapid impoverishment of the masses as wages soon became grossly inadequate to meet basic necessities for majority of civil servants (for example, currently highest paid federal civil servants earn less than N2m per annum; meanwhile, the school fees and related expenses for two kids in ‘befitting’ private schools in Nigeria would eat up over a million naira a year!)  

In the last two decades or so, government’s mismanagement of the economy further compounded their ability to pay a living wage; nonetheless, the civil servants continued to perform their duties with the ultimate hope that at least the government will be noble enough to fulfill the second leg of their contract; that is, providing them with reasonable and sustainable pension income when they become old and frail!  Alas, current realities suggest that hope had been misplaced!  Our sensibilities are assaulted regularly by news of pensioners waiting in endless queues in the burning sun to collect their meager pensions; and worse still, many have actually collapsed and died in what is certainly a reality show of shame!

All sorts of excuses have been thrown up to explain how the labours of our heroes past have come to be in vain, but what is most striking is that no culprits have been found and so no one has been punished for this crime against humanity!  Where did the pension funds go, who appropriated them, or failed to appropriate them?  Surely, such wicked negligence was not induced and perpetrated by ghosts!  The wound must hurt more for our retired patriots as they helplessly watch their lives slip shoddily away while those who brought them to their knees and some others of them to their early graves continue to cruise around town as the nouveau riche with official and unofficial accolades to booth!  Indeed, this scenario has served as a good lesson for incumbent civil servants; take care of yourself from the government treasury while you have the chance, because nobody is going to care about you once you are out!  The work ethic has become “everyman for himself and God for us all!”  Regrettably such negative and anti communal ethos will prevail so long as those who brought us to this naked position go unpunished!  This should apply, not only for pension funds embezzlement or mismanagement but also for all the other areas of conspicuously apparent misapplication of public funds in at least the last two decades!  Ironically, these looters of our treasury turn round to use their ill gotten wealth to intimidate and plot to politically oppress the same people, their erstwhile benefactors, forever!  The indication from the 2006 budget is that the federal government owes our retired patriots over N2,000 billion (just over $18bn at the official rate of exchange of N109=$1 i.e. the  rate at which the CBN converts the distributable monthly dollar revenue to the three tiers of government).  Fortunately, the whole amount of N2 trillion is not due for redemption immediately in one go, but the government is yet to formally define exactly how much is required to clear current arrears out of this sum; indeed, Mr. President described the issue of pension arrears as “… a big problem due to the need to verify size and extent”  in his budget speech.  In other words, the government is still as at today not certain of the depth of the problem!

At least, the National Pensions Commission has now been commissioned “to complete and document the arrears owed”!  Our sincere sympathy must go to our retired patriots; they still have a long way to travel before Uhuru (celebration of freedom)!  If the authorities do not know who and how much they currently owe as arrears, how can they effectively appropriate and schedule payments transparently, especially in an environment where most civil servants’ take home pay can barely take them to and from work daily and the opportunity of handsome dividends from ghost pensioners create ready succour!  However, in a gesture designed to give the Obasanjo administration a human face, the Minister for Finance recently announced that some of the arrears owed pensioners and also local contractors (who are currently owed over N300bn – more than the capital base of the current 24 consolidated banks) would be converted to bonds with yields at about 15% per annum.

It is not yet clear how the government will determine the priorities, but what is clear is that beneficiaries who invariably would be old and feeble and desperately in need of cash after prolonged deprivation can discount their bonds at about 15% of their face value from the securities market and collect the  reduced cash balance!  Never mind that the pension arrears had attracted no interest payments or default penalties, the same factors that had snowballed an otherwise modest national debt of about $10bn in the 1980s to over $32bn even after payments of over $17bn to the group of international creditors called  the Paris Club!  No Sir!  No such frills for our patriotic pensioners, not even apologies; after all, they should be happy that inspite of the severe devaluation of their pension incomes, the government is now “magnanimous” enough to provide an alternative window for them to receive even ‘less’ value for their hard-earned pensions if they are in a hurry because of advancing old age to collect some of this money before they die.

Oh, what compassion!  It is unlikely that the people who contrived such a solution have retired old and weak patriots in their families; in any event, even if they have, the ample opportunities for supplementary income by current incumbent of high public office would suffice to provide a buffer for their extended families!  Talk about shortsightedness of public officers.