Hungry-looking pensioners numbering hundreds of Abia State took to the streets of Umuahia, the state capital, to protest what they called the government’s insensitivity to the plights of their members.
The pensioners bemoaned that their members who are being owed as much as 20 months arrears of pensions and 18 years of unpaid gratuity were dying on daily basis.
Dressed in black, the pensioners, some of them looking sickly and fragile, marched from School Road office through the busy Aba Road to the Government House.
Emmanuel Okparanta, the chairman of the Abia State Civil/Public Pensioners Association said his members are being owed several months of pension arrears.
Okparanta lamented “Pensioners are dying on daily basis as a result of delayed payment of pension and gratuity. Since the beginning of the year only one month pension has been paid them, even that of February, only few received the alert.”
He said they had exhausted all avenues of trying to draw Government’s and House of Assembly’s attention to their plight their members without success, giving a breakdown to include “unpaid pension arrears from January to October, 2017 (10 months), unpaid accumulated gratuity for 18 years, unpaid backlog of pension arrears for 2013 (12 months) 2014 (8 months) 2015 (10 months) 2016 (9 months)”.
According to him, “the government has also failed to key into the pension harmonization from 1999 to 2010, saying it is the reason some of the pensioners in the State still receive as little as N500 monthly.
“We have been dehumanized and subjected to unimaginable suffering and unfulfilled promises by the state government”, he cried out.
The chairman explained that the decision to embark on the protest was to “inform Abians and the world in general the inhuman treatment Abia pensioners are facing since the year 1998 to 2017”.
He said that it was a thing of regret that promises made by the state government to offset the backlog of arrears were not fulfilled, pointing out that the condition of his members was pitiable.
Receiving the pensioners, Chief Emma Nwabuko, the Principal Secretary to Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, who assured them that the government was making serious effort to pay them.
