At last, the much-agitated debate about police exit from the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) may have rested. The Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, has kicked against the bill seeking to exempt the agency from the CPS, saying it would not favour the police force.
Egbetokun who stated this while addressing some police officers recently at a public function noted that if the police exit the CPS, they would go back to square one.
“Yes it is true that a bill has been passed by the National Assembly for the police to exit the CPS and that bill is awaiting presidential assent, but has anyone of you seen the details of the content of that bill? You need to go and look at the bill and see where you are exiting to.
“Everybody is shouting ‘let us go, let us go’. You must know where you are going before you start shouting, ‘I want to go. When I became IG, I set up a committee to look into the pension issue and we discovered that the bill awaiting the assent of the President does not favour us. If we exit the present Contributory Pension Scheme, we are going back to square one, where we were before the introduction of the scheme.
“Our pension will be in the hands of politicians and they will be the one to address our pension. Our pension will be subject to budgetary allocation every year and when the government does not have money, you will not be paid. You remember those days when retirees will go and line up and wait for months and they will not get anything, that is the place you want us to go back to,” he stated.
Also speaking during a public hearing conducted by the Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service on the bill sponsored by Senator Binos Dauda Yaroe, representing Adamawa South, Mr. Ivor Takor, Director, Centre for Pension Rights Advocacy (CPRA), stated that the CPS remains the most secure and sustainable system for ensuring police officers’ pensions and safeguarding them from old age poverty.
Rather than exiting police from the CPS, Takor made the following recommendations: “Enhanced Gratuity Payments: He recommended that the Federal Government should provide police retirees with a gratuity amounting to 300 percent of their final annual gross pay upon retirement, while their Retirement Savings Accounts (RSAs) continue to fund their monthly pensions etc.”
