PDP drops damning allegation against Buhari’s govt

– PDP says FG has carried out an illegal action by not remitting workers’ pensions for such a long time

– The opposition party claims that the FG has always wanted to use pension funds for government projects

– The party says the funds which were not remitted have not been accounted for by FG

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has condemned the federal government for allegedly hijacking pensions of its workers following reports that it had not remitted deductions from their salaries in the past 10 months.

The opposition party, in a statement released on Wednesday, August 3, alleged that the contributions which ran into billions of naira cannot be accounted for.

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It slammed the action as totally unjustifiable, ‘illegal’ and a total departure from the goal of the party (PDP) to safeguard the future of Nigerian workers after retirement through contributory pension scheme when it was in power.

“The non-remittance of pension funds by the FG shows that rather than deal with the amendment of laws & regulations required to grant legal access to pension funds, the FG has gone ahead to arbitrarily hijack workers’ pensions.

“These actions are illegal, ultra vires the powers of the FG and are outright theft of salaries/pensions of civil servants.

“We condemn these actions which negate the efforts by PDP led governments to grow pension funds from N815bn in 2007 to over N5tr in 2015,”

The party also accused the FG of having always had an eye on the huge pension funds.

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“You will recall that the APC-led FG has been eyeing pension funds for a while. In January 2016, Babatunde Fashola advocated the “unlocking of pension funds to finance govt”.

“You will also recall that in April 2016, Kemi Adeosun made a similar call to use pension funds to “finance our future”.”

It added, “This refusal to remit the pensions contributions is in spite of FG’s deduction of these pension contributions from the salaries of civil servants for the past 10 months.

“As it stands, contributions deducted from civil servants’ hard earned salaries & the budgetary allocations for FG’s contributions for pensions since Sept 2015 are unaccounted for.”

The PDP claims comes just weeks after the president of the Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp), Eguarekhide Longe said that remittances of pension contributions for public workers by both the federal and state levels have dropped significantly.

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