OVER 86 senior pensioners of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) may have died in the past 10 years while waiting for the bank to implement the Federal Government policy on harmonisation of pension scheme for civil servants.

Documents presented by representatives of the pensioners, and the attestation by their lawyer, confirmed this staggering mortality rate among the pensioners.

Indeed, the remains of the second plaintiff in the 12-year-old legal dispute, Joachim Adebowale Ajala, were interred in Lagos at the weekend.

Only last year, the first plaintiff, Jacob Oladele Amao, slumped and died in court while proceedings were on in the epic case.

The Guardian gathered that sequel to the May 2000 Lagos High Court judgment, compelling the CBN to comply with the harmonised pension scheme, as contained in the Federal Government’s White Paper and Circulars issued in 1997; the bank had sought to evade compliance.

This, it did, by engaging the pensioners in a running legal battle that only ended with the Supreme Court judgment of May 21, 2010 in favour of the former CBN employees.

However, the initial position of the CBN was that it was unable to afford the payment of theharmonisation money and that its pensioners were not included in the government directive.

The CBN argument was, therefore, advanced around what it described as the principle of “affordability and sustainability.” But the pensioners went to court and won all the cases.

Nonetheless, many of the pensioners had died while the legal tussle to implement the government directive went on from the High Court to the Supreme Court, which finally put a lid on the case by directing the CBN to pay the former employees without further delay.

Efforts to reach the Corporate Affairs Department of the CBN throughout last week did not yield positive results, as its mobile phone was not going through.

Although a top director of the bank, who was reached last night, identified with the plight of the pensioners, he said he needed to study the issue before making comments on telephone.

The official also requested The Guardian to send a questionnaire via the SMS, a reply that was not received before filing this report.

-Guardian

Posted by admin on Mar 6 2011. Filed under Latest Politics, National Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry