Palliative: FG Yet to Pay Us N25,000 Wage Award – Pensioners

• Nigeria Union of Pensioners calls on the Federal Government to fulfill its promise of a N25,000 wage award for retirees
• Pensioners express frustration over delays in receiving payments, despite acknowledging a recent 20% pension increase from January to August 2024

Members of the Nigeria Union of Pensioners (NUP) have called on the Federal Government to fulfill its promise of a N25,000 wage award, which was pledged last year as a measure to cushion the effects of fuel subsidy removal.

The pensioners also appealed to President Bola Tinubu to direct the National Salaries, Income and Wages Commission to issue an enabling circular for the new “minimum pension,” in line with the recently signed minimum wage law for workers.

Last year, the government promised to pay N35,000 to federal workers and N25,000 to retirees as a wage award for six months, starting from October 2023, as a palliative measure. However, investigations revealed that while federal workers and some state employees have received the six-month payment, retirees still await theirs.

At the pensioners’ headquarters in Abuja on Tuesday, NUP spokesman Bunmi Ogunkolade explained that pensioners have made multiple appeals to the government through appropriate channels, but their pleas have not been addressed.

“We’ve written several letters to the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation. We’ve paid different courtesy visits to the ministry to no avail. We were told that our matter was hanging because of what happened in the ministry,” Ogunkolade stated.

He added, “We’ve also lodged our complaints to the National Assembly. We met with the Chairman of the House Committee on Pension. We’re using this medium again to appeal to them to give us the wage award and resolve the issue of minimum pension.”

Despite the pending wage award, Ogunkolade acknowledged that pensioners had received a 20% pension increment in their bank accounts from January to August 2024 and thanked the federal government for this development.

“We are using this medium to appreciate the federal government led by President Bola Tinubu for fulfilling his promise to effect a 20% increment on the monthly pension of our members. This is unprecedented,” he stated.

He hoped that the remaining issues — the palliative wage award and the “minimum pension” — would soon be resolved.