Some retired police officers have cried out to the Nigeria Police Force and the Police Service Commission to pay them their retirement gratuity as they are now languishing in unprecedented suffering and hardship.
The retirees who preferred anonymity because of victimisation said since they retired in 2019, the police authorities have been playing hide and seek game over the payment of their gratuity as the pension office has consistently frustrated their efforts with the true situation now shrouded in uncertainty.
One of the retired officers who last served in Lagos Command said they are passing through untold hardship as their families have now been exposed to intense hunger with many of them suffering from a wide range of sicknesses due to an acute lack of money to take care of themselves and dependants.
He said the retirees religiously adhered to the procedure required for the access to their gratuity but nothing concrete was yet to come out of their efforts due to the insensitivity of the police authorities.
“Six months to our retirement, the police authorities asked us to fill some forms for the processing of our gratuity but we didn’t hear anything until about one year after we left the service when we were again asked to fill another form because they claimed the computers in which our data were initially captured had been destroyed,” he said.
“We were hoping that the gratuity would be processed and the money delivered soon but nothing happened despite many assurances. They asked us again to go back to our states for another round of computation because the processes of pension had been decentralised but now if we go to Lagos pension office, nobody is there to even give us any information. It’s been about four years now since we left the service and we haven’t had access to our gratuity. Many of us have been rendered useless; our families are hungry, and we don’t have money to take care of our health while one or two of us are dead.”
“I almost lost my life when robbers attacked me on my way to Abuja to pursue my gratuity, another retiree said. “As we speak, one of us has gone blind because there is no money to take care of himself; he is now in Ibadan unable to access quality medical care.”
Another member of the 2019 police retirees group alleged that although some of them have now collected the gratuity, most of the beneficiaries were northerners.
“We are beginning to think that the selective payment of the gratuity has tribal inclinations because most of those who we heard have been settled are from the North while the majority of us if not all of us from the South have been left to suffer,” he said.
“The pensions office should talk to us, we need to know, when this will end. We have all served and retired meritoriously as stated in our Discharge/ Retirement letters.
Very soon a new IGP will come and he too will ask us to “give him time to settle down”. We are tire of that phrase”
