PTAD Owes Parastatal Pensioners N150bn

The Pension Transitional Arrangement Department (PTAD) has a liability of over N150 billion to pay pensioners who retired from parastatals of government.

Its Executive Secretary, Dr. Chioma Ejikeme made this known in an interview.

She, however, said the liability was being cleared as the Federal Government provided money to pay the pension arrears.

She said: “When it comes to funding for pension, you have to separate the running cost from the pension funds. In terms of pension funds, I must say, that the government has really been quite benevolent in making sure that money is provided to pay pension in arrears. The only place we have a problem is in the parastatal pension department.

“The liability became huge as a result of the disengagement because of the time they were disengaged in 2005 and since that time nobody had paid them anything until 2018 when President Muhammadu Buhari instructed that we put them on the payroll and start paying them. But the arrears had accumulated for 13 years.

“We have been able to take care of the liabilities of pensioners from other departments of government to the best of our ability based on the budgeting provisions we have been getting”.

On how much has been paid to pensioners, she said: “Our pension wage bill is about N7 billion on a monthly basis. I don’t know any organisation of government that churns out the kind of funds we do monthly.

“Before October, last year, when we removed 21,000 pensioners, the wage bill for the parastatal pension department was about N4.8 billion, but at the time we removed 21,000, it came to N4 billion. This means we were able to save about 700 million.’’

She told the pensioners that the Directorate was established to serve them.

“We don’t want them to sweat to get their pension,” she noted.