Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has disclosed that technological glitches are responsible for the non-payment of pensions to retired federal civil servants in Lagos.
This was disclosed by the Executive Secretary of PTAD, Mrs Chioma Ejikeme, while speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Thursday.
She said her agency was working on resolving the delayed payments.
The clarification was made after the Lagos chapter of the National Union of Pensioners (NUP) lamented that some pensioners were being owed up to nine months.
The secretary of the chapter, Mr Abiodun Michael, noted that “Most of these people, their money go into medicals. They are dying every day. In a week, you will get four to five obituaries.”
Replying, Mrs Ejikeme insisted that the issue was not from PTAD but the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation.
She further explained, “We send for reports from GIFMIS (Government Integrated Financial Management Information System) to get the payments that have been made. Sometimes, it takes a week, sometimes more.
“So, we have that lag in communication as to whether the payments we made failed or not. And when we have such a situation, when the pensioners complain, we ask them to send us their statement of accounts, so that we can confirm that that payment didn’t go through.
“If he (Abiodun Michael) says 18,000 pensioners have not been paid, it means that PTAD has a bias for Lagos State pensioners. Why is it that the other pensioners from other states all over the federation are not making the same complaints?
“These are pockets of complaints and we are addressing them. This is a system, it’s technology, there’s nothing we can do about it.
“I have apologised to the pensioners about the three-month arrears. We try to explain technology to our pensioners, but they don’t seem to understand.
“We are very happy to have EFCC and ICPC come look into what we are doing.
“It is not within our domain. It is within the domain of the GIFMIS platform. It is within the domain of the technology that is domiciled within the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation.”
