They urged President Muhammadu Buhari to call
Okorocha to order, saying He behaves disrespectfully and treats senior
citizens in the state with deplorably.” According to Ezeji,”Okorocha derives
joy in seeing elders in this state coming out from time to time to the streets
to ask for their pension. What did Okorocha do with the bailout fund that
President Buhari gave to him? We are protesting for the third time.” The latest
development, which they described as ”wicked of Okorocha’s government is the
plan to pay 40 percent of the accumulated arrears and gratuities and forfeit of
60 percent. We say no to this latest government plan to deny us the
payment of 60 percent of arrears up to December. ”As at December 2016, the
state is owing Imo pensioners between 22 months and 77 months arrears.
Our gratuities have remained unpaid since 1998 till date.
Rochas Okorocha “Also, the government has refused to harmonize our pensions
since 2000 to date. All the efforts by the union overseeing the welfare of
pensioners have not yielded any fruit.”
Those protesting are not pensioners —Imo govt But reactiing to the
allegation, the Imo State government said the issue of pensions in the state
had been resolved, saying the people who protested at the Government House,
Owerri, yesterday, were not pensioners. A statement by the Chief Press
Secretary to Governor Rochas Okorocha, Sam Onwuemeodo read: “No pensioner in the state was part of that
protest. Those involved in the exercise were between the ages of 40-45. And we
challenge those involved to prove us wrong by publishing their names, their
autonomous communities, local government areas, years of retirement, where they
retired from and their identification numbers. “The truth of the matter as it
concerns the issue of pensions in the state is that more than 99 percent of the
pensioners in the state have been paid arrears of their pensions upto December
2016.
The remaining one percent are pensioners who were omitted in the first
payment exercise and they are at the moment receiving their cheques. “The
government had long before now complained that the monthly pension bill of N1.4
billion had become too cumbersome for the state government to bear with 27
local governments, whereas another state with 44 local governments pay far less
than that amount as pension. “Hence, the arrangement that pensioners from grade
level one to six should get one hundred percent of whatever was the arrears of
their respective pensions, while those on grade level seven to 17 would have 40
percent of their total arrears paid. The idea was to solve the lingering issue
of pension arrears in the state once and for all. “It is, therefore, surprising
to see few people claiming to be pensioners at the Government House on a
protest over an exercise that has been successfully completed.”
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