PENSIONERS in Cross-River State

PENSIONERS in Cross-River State have broken into two factions.In fact, leaders of the pensioners have been fighting for the past five years climaxing into the emergence of a body that calls itself the Association of Local Government Pensioners, from the umbrella body of pensioners in the country ; Nigeria Union of Pensioners , NUP.

ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads The new association caters for the welfare of workers who retired from the local government services in the state and at present, they are over 5000 members. Chairman of the state NUP, Benjamin Ettah, told Vanguard that sometime in 2012, some retired senior civil servants from the local government service came to his office to demand that the union intervene in the affairs of their local body by dissolving it so that they could find a place in the activities of the body.

Position of authority He said: “But I told them that I do not have powers to interfere or dissolve the body since there is no crisis there and if they wanted to function in the union, all they needed to do is go in there and gradually rise to the position of authority.” Ettah claimed that “they also demanded to know how we spend the dues paid by the pensioners and we told them that the money is sent to Abuja national headquarters of our union and a percentage is returned to us to run the affairs of the union.

They said how could that be; that the entire money should be kept and spent by the state chapter.” •Bassey Okosin, Chairman, Association of Local Government Pensioners,CRS •Benjamin Ettah, Chairman, Nigeria Union of Pensioners, Cross River State He claimed that the delegation visited his office on three occasions to make the same demand and when he told them the same thing, he never heard from them again until he was informed that they had formed an association and had written to the pensions board to start remitting the monthly dues of retired local government staff to them.

The NUP Chairman said: “They got a letter from the then Attorney General of the state, Mr Attah Ochinke who stated that under the Labour Reform Act, retired civil servants cannot form a union and so the dues should be given to the new association and we went to court and we have won the case three times.” He lamented that though the NUP won the case three times, the pensions board kept remitting the dues of the local pensioners to the association, saying last month “we got another judgement in our favour and also asked the court to grant us a motion that the dues of local government pensioners should be paid to us and that was granted.”

However, Bassey Okosin, the Chairman of Association of Local Government Pensioners in his submission, said they decided to break away from the NUP because the officials at the head of the union in the state were not interested in the welfare of the pensioners but only in collecting dues when pension was paid. “We went to them and asked what they were doing to ensure regular payment of pension to the pensioners because most of them depend on the pension for their existence and they told us payment of pension was the duty of government and there was nothing they could do to facilitate fast payment of the money stipend and we said no, we had to take our fate in our hands.”

Pension payment According to Okosin, since the break out, local government pension payment had become regular and the pensioners were happy with the development, declaring that “in the past, pensioners were owed months of unpaid pensions but with our consistent efforts, the pensioners are now paid alongside the workers or a few days after.”

He added that with the new development pensioners in the state were comparatively better than most states in terms of the payment of monthly pension, noting “Our presence in the system has contributed so much towards eradication of the malpractices. We had before now identified our members monthly before payment and sent the appropriate names for deletion which has also helped to save some funds for the government.”