The other day, a friend of mine wrote to me from Abuja asking for small financial assistance, complaining that he was ‘stranded’ in the office for lack of money to get his way back home. His house was several kilometers away from where he worked. He had repeatedly gone to his pension administrators to retrieve his money, since he had retired from his previous job and was over 60 years old. But the (pension) providers kept asking him to come back after one month, even after he had filled out the forms and signed all the papers that needed to be signed.
Still, the money was denied to him. Even half of the ‘kept’ amount that was promised to be given in a lump sum the moment the pensioner reached sixty years of age was denied him in a charade that has been going on for more than a year.
And about 13 years ago, a colleague and close friend at one of the leading newspapers in the country went to his pension providers to take his money to enable him to send some of it to his aging parents in the village. He was told he would only be given half of the money, and the rest would be given to him in bits as a monthly pension. But he was told that even the half would only be given to him when he clocked the age of sixty.
He resigned from the newspaper, as he did from his preceding lecturing job at the University of Benin, Edo State, where he taught Philosophy, to go to greener pastures so as to be able to take good care of his parents. After one year of clocking his 60th birthday, he went to his pension providers, expecting to get the money, but it was not to be as they kept up the usual ‘go and come back on . . .’.
Being someone from a part of the country where money is not a joking matter, my friend showed them the kind of stuff he was made of, and they gave him half of his forced savings before he made the ‘scene’ he promised to make if he did not get half of the money he was promised the last time he was there.
He had lectured Philosophy at the university level, meaning he was a person who knew what he was doing. The colleague and friend had also worked as a journalist in a very influential newspaper, which meant he could cause bad publicity for them. Bad publicity was, and still is, the last thing such ‘scammy’ organizations require.
The ordeals suffered by the latter friend made me hesitant about going to ask for my involuntary contribution to my pension, administered by PREMIUM PENSION FUND. The organization is always quick to send me closed seasonal and birthday greetings text messages that cannot be replied to. They, therefore, remain incommunicado, even though I desperately want the money NOW.
The pension scammers apparently have not borrowed a leaf from the boss of 419 and other forms of graft in the country, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, by developing a thin skin to criticism of corruption. The president was, late last year, declared the third (3rd) most corrupt person in the world.
Apart from the end-of-2024 damning verdict from the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an Indian television station, First Post, rehashed the allegations (perception, in the words of the station) against President Tinubu under the caption ‘The Endemic Corruption In Nigeria’. The report was made because of the recent sacking of 10 officials by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for the alleged disappearance (theft) of items worth between $350,000 to $400,000 kept in the custody of the anti-graft agency.
The Indian television station said that Nigeria used to be the number one economy in Africa but has slid down the ranking to number four NOW because of the perceived corruption of President Tinubu. The station also said that the president alone gave the whopping $13 billion (N15.6 trillion) Lagos to Calabar Coastal Highway contract to a company half-owned by his son.
Not finished with the allegations against the Nigerian leader, the television station added that Tinubu once forfeited some $420,000 to the US government left at an airport. The money was suspected to be proceeds of drugs and belonged to the person who would later become the Nigerian president. The station also spoke of the president’s certificate saga, questioning the veracity of his claim that it was obtained at the university it was said to have been obtained from.
Scamming reminds me of the 419ers trying to scam me from ‘Zimbabwe’, as the phone indicates the country the calls are coming from. Maybe I should say a momentary call (flashing, in Nigerian parlance), because that is what it has always been since 13 months ago when I started receiving such calls. They have numbered over 50 times to date. Yesterday and today, the calls were made to my phone. Anyway, that is by the way.
My conclusion, and many others’, is that the pension scheme was introduced to scam many hapless and helpless citizens who have retired of their hard-earned retirement money to further massively enrich the already very rich.
With the endemic CORRUPTION that President Tinubu has prioritized, which Nigerians are regularly updated on the internet and in world media, it is now almost impossible for the common pensioner to get their money from their pension fraudsters, who go by the nomenclature of ‘Pension Operators’ in the country.
The Nigerian president is found, by a global opinion poll, to be the third (3rd) most CORRUPT person in the world, after President William Ruto of Kenya, who is rated at number two, and the champion of champions (from backwards), former President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, who came top at number one. Two recently ousted Al Assad of Syria was dubbed the ‘MAN OF THE YEAR, 2024’ in terms of corruption, as he was alleged to be busy enriching himself from the people’s Commonwealth, while the same compatriots were being killed in a furious raging civil war in the country.
May God come to the aid of such Nigerians and confiscate their rights from the hands of the pension scammers, plus the ugly faces behind them, and return it to the deserving owners.
Labaran wrote from Katsina.
