Kaduna State government said it has registered 16,378 pensioners on its payroll, just as the state commenced full implementation of the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).
Disclosing this at an occasion to mark the commencement of payment of pension benefits under the CPS in Kaduna State, Executive Secretary, Kaduna State Pension Bureau, Dan Ndackson, said as at February, 2017, there were 9,655 pensioners in the payroll of State Pensioners and 6,728 in that of Local Government Areas compared to the 11,531 and 6,734 respectively in the payrolls as at July, 2015.
The February 2017 figures, he added, were inclusive of additional new retirees on the payroll between August 2015 and January, 2016 who were not part of the July 2015 figures and whose retirement processes had been verified and cleared by the Offices of the State and Local Government Auditors-General.
Expecting a surge in the payroll for pensioners on the Defined Benefits Scheme (DBS) in subsequent months due to the large number of people who retired towards the end of 2016 to avoid falling into the Contributory Pension Scheme, he noted that their files are yet to reach the Bureau for processing and inclusion in the payroll.
“Unless MDAs and LGAs forward the files of all retirees under the Defined Benefits Scheme to the Bureau for processing in good time, our pension payroll may continue to rise throughout 2017. Conversely, we were not able to find many retirees under the CPS in the first quarter of 2017 due to the rush to take early retirement in 2016 especially by such people,” he pointed out.
The Bureau, he stressed, commenced biometric data capture of retirees using its own IT infrastructure and personnel as from November, 2016, adding that with this initiative, the waiting time for retirees to be included in the pension payroll has reduced drastically to a maximum of one month after audit clearance, thereby saving the retiree the pains of staying longer after retirement without income.
The application deployed for this data capture is robust enough to permit diverse queries and reports to be generated from the database, he said.
The State, he added, has also put the Group Life Insurance Policy in place for its employees as the Kaduna State public sector has been opened to all Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) to scout for Retirement Savings Account(RSA) business, noting that the Retirement Benefits Bond Redemption Fund (RBBRF) Account has been opened at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Highlighting the challenges affecting the full implementation of CPS, he said, despite the introduction of the scheme in the State since 2007, majority of workers in the State, irrespective of their levels, remain ignorant about how the scheme works.