Atiku Abubakar, a presidential contender for the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has dismissed President Bola Tinubu’s recent accusations about the federal government’s pension backlog as pointless political manoeuvring by the incompetent APC-led administration.
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Tinubu criticised Atiku for “privatising government assets and leaving pensioners unpaid,” as reported by the footynaija.
The President’s attempt to deflect attention away from the country’s pension crisis by blaming the Obasanjo/Atiku administration, which had departed office nearly twenty years prior, was characterised by Atiku’s media office as “untenable frivolity” in a statement released on Friday. The delegation was led by Governor Babagana Zulum.
President Tinubu and the incompetent APC government should educate themselves more on the topics of effective leadership and developmental discourse. There is a spectrum of government. Current leaders must stop squandering precious national resources on dragging their feet and pointing fingers at previous administrations. According to Atiku, a successor is entitled to inherit both assets and liabilities.
An unsustainable pension liability deficit estimated at over N2 trillion (about 25% of the country’s GDP at the time) had accrued in the Defined Benefits Scheme (DBS), which Atiku’s camp claims President Olusegun Obasanjo/Atiku Abubakar inherited in 1999. The scheme was broken, unfunded, and non-contributory.
It was pointed out that instead of starting to blame their predecessors, they got their hands dirty to fix the problem.
It went on to say, “However, by the time Obasanjo/Atiku departed office in 2007, their administration had entirely transformed the sector by passing the Pension Reform Act of 2004, leaving behind a Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) that was fully funded, privately managed, and regulated by the newly formed National Pension Commission (PenCom).”
According to Atiku’s camp, the pension system before the Obasanjo/Atiku era was disjointed, complicated, and rife with issues like “ghost pensioners,” inaccurate data, and lengthy bureaucratic red tape.
The administration of the former vice president also brought up the fact that many workers in the private sector did not have access to any kind of pension plan, and that those that did were either badly run or had no money at all.
The statement claims that the Pension Reform Act (PRA) 2004, a historic law that reformed the country’s retirement system and was left behind by the Obasanjo/Atiku administration when they left office in 2007, was a boon to pensioners and was modelled after international best practices.