The Federal Capital Territory’s Office of the Public Complaints Commission is set to strengthen its existing collaboration with the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) for efficient service delivery.
The Honourable Commissioner, Comrade Dalhatu Ezekiel Musa disclosed this on Tuesday when he paid a courtesy call to the Executive Secretary of PTAD , Dr Chioma Ejikeme in her office in Abuja.
While commending the Executive Secretary and the agency for their efforts in relieving the pains of pensioners across the country by ensuring payment of their pensions
He added that, the agency is strategic to the Commission as bulk of the complaints he receives are from pensioners.
“I must commend what PTAD is doing. At PCC, the major part of our job is centred around pension, from the public sector especially. If I take statistics of the complaints we receive, 60 per cent is centred on pension ranging from Police officers that have retired, civil servants that have retired and others.
Why I am commending you is because at every point we have cause to engage with you, your responses have always been apt and on time” he said.
“There are times we don’t need to be flexing muscles when handling issues within the Government institutions, there are times some issues are better handling via the instrumentality of synergy and robust roundtable discussion to proffer solution. Again, part of what PCC does is to serve as a mediator and correct the bad impression and wrong perception of people against some critical Government agencies.”
The commissioner concluded his remark by reiterating that, PCC would continue to remain the watchdog to all Government institutions and to ensure adequate service delivery to the general public.
In her response, the Executive Secretary said the wellbeing of pensioners remain the agency’s concern and they are committed to making their lives better.
She said, “PTAD was established as game-changers, to wipe the tears away from Nigerian pensioners, people who put in their youthful years to serve the country and now is the time for them to relax and enjoy the fruit of their labour. So this is exactly what PTAD stands for. On a regular basis, we have complaints coming from PCC, we try our best to see what we can do to properly address those issues. But what we are seeing and I am sure you are noticing that is a kind of Oliver Twist situation, because we are doing all we are supposed to be doing, the expectations are now higher. And problems that have stayed for 20 something years they now expect us to solve them within a twinkle of an eye. So sometimes when they say the complaints brought to us are not properly being handled it is as a result of the fundings that we have.
“PTAD has tried over the last years to be proactive in trying to handle these situations. First of all, we embarked on massive validating and verification exercises all over the country. To be able to establish a credible database of pensioners, validation, verification exercise to be able to compute accurately what these pensioners are meant to get. And most recently, we had a massive project that had to do with civil service pensioners, a lot of them are not on the payroll, non-payment of arrears gratuities and even next of kin. We set up a project and from that project, we were able to make considerable progress when it comes to complaints resolution in particular. To that extent, I would say the number of complaints from pensioners has come down. I am sure if you check your statistics and your records you’d know the numbers are coming down. If we notice we haven’t paid your gratuity we would pay you. If we notice that we are owing here, we would sort it, and a lot of them the funds they have been receiving has been coming to them as a surprise because they did not know we were working on these things. PTAD is working hard with a crop of competent, confident and delighted staff” she stated.
