Kogi State pensioners are currently living in palpable fear as Yahaya Bello’s administration resorted to pay pensioners selectively for the month of March 2022.
This development started on Wednesday, 6th April 2022 (afternoon ) when a handful of people, especially those banking with First Bank, UBA and Union Bank reportedly got their alerts for payment of their March pension scheme while majority are yet to be paid.
The difficult situation that had inflicted pains on the senior citizens, started in February, 2022, when they were paid 70% of their pensions instead of 100% and to worsen it now, the selective payment for the month of March.
BusinessDay gathered that the state government may have run short of funds after paying the civil servants.
Also, investigation revealed that chunks of money seems to have been diverted for the declaration of the Presidential ambition of the governor last Saturday.
Read also: States’ huge debts, low revenues raise concerns
The worst scenario is the usual lack of openness of the state government, as no word of explanation has come from the Director General (DG), in charge of pension, Mariam Ahmed, when our Correspondent visited her office at the State Secretariat, she was said to be in a meeting.
She also did not pick calls, neither did she respond to SMS sent to him.
Further investigation showed that those that were selected for payment are in gross minority of pensioners in the state.
Speaking to our correspondent a few days ago on Mobile phone, the state Commissioner for Finance, Asiwaju Asiru Idris said that government was not owing pensioners and attributed the current difficulty in payments to network failure, assuring that all pensioners will be paid.
“The delay in payment of March pensions is due to logistics problems of transferring the money from Access Bank to UBA,” he said.
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