The Executive Secretary of PTAD, Dr. Chioma Ejikeme, told reporters yesterday in Ibadan at the biometric verification of federal civil service retirees under the Defined Benefit Scheme, DBS, that the exercise was primarily for Federal Government retirees who were left out for one reason or another in the 2019 exercise, which was held in the Southwest.

She said: “What we are doing now is a mop-up verification. It is not like the few verifications that we did in 2019 and after the review of verification of that of 2019, we have to validate that verification and in the process of validating that verification, we moved people who were on our payroll who are not yet verified.”

“So, a lot of them have been coming back and this was in October 2020. Then we moved about 21,000 pensioners who were not verified but were on the payroll. So they have been trickling back, saying they were bonafide pensioners; they were qualified and because of the numbers, we now decided to come back and do a mop-up verification.”

“So, this is for all those people who feel that they are unknown, that they are not captured, who knew that they are bonafide.

“We are asking all of them to avail themselves of this opportunity, to come and get verified because without that verification we won’t have a view on our database.”

She did say, however, that the agency had gone to great lengths to eliminate the activities that plagued the previous pension system.

“When PTAD was founded, it inherited a slew of issues that had plagued the old pension offices, especially the Police, Civil Service, Customs, Immigration, and Prisons (CIPPO), as well as the poorly managed and underfunded Boards of Trustees of parastatals and agencies.”

“There was no formal database of pensioners’ records,” she claimed, “and there were incomplete payrolls and documented instances of phantom beneficiaries, as well as suspicions of widespread fraud in the offices’ operations.”

Some of the pensioners at the Law Hub, Ring Road, Ibadan, venue of the ongoing mop-up verification exercise, expressed happiness over what they called the ‘change agenda’ of the executive secretary of the organization.

In his remark, a federal government pensioner, Mr. Seyi Adeniyi, noted pension administration in Nigeria, especially as it concerns government pensioners, was nothing to write home about.

“The system was notorious for fraud, no by government officials who engaged in the diversion, for personal use, the funds earmarked for pensioners.”

“The situation has changed following the measures and structures put in place by the PTAD management which has sanitized the system and restored hope to pensioners.”

“A lot of material and human resources have been deployed to make the agency deliver on its goal,” he added.

Another pensioner, Mr. Kunle Ajibade, who described the exercise as very smooth commended the management of PTAD for putting up a water-tight arrangement for the smooth conduct of the exercise.