Kaduna State government says it has spent 19.9billion naira on pension, gratuity and death benefits of its civil servants within the first one year of Governor Uba Sani in office.
The Executive Secretary, Kaduna Pension Bureau, Professor Salamatu Idris Isah stated this at a one day Sensitization on Data Recapture Exercise for Kaduna State Public Servants under the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).
Professor Salamatu explained that, between May 2023 and May 2024, Kaduna Statement had expended 13 billion naira on the state monthly pension scheme and local government pension.
According to her, 6.9billion had been expended on gratuity payment within the same period.
She noted that, the essence of the programme was to educate the civil servants on pension and also to ensure that, all Kaduna Civil Servants are well documented by the Pension Fund Administrators PFAs.
She maintained that, it was the only way to ensuring a seamless receipt of retirement benefits, urged the civil servants to perfect their records to avoid challenges after retirement.
“We want to from now prevent the challenges of errors in names, BVN not tallying with name or National Identity Number (NIN) not captured.
“The reason we had to do this data recapturing is that, a good number of the civil servants were captured when there was no BVN or NIN.
“We also got to know that the PFAs have not been able to do data capturing properly for all the public servants of Kaduna State. Even though they have registered with the PFAs but, the PFAs getting detailed information about their clients when they are retiring is significant”, She concluded.
Participants at the Data Capturing
Professor Salamatu Isah revealed that, with the sensitization, civil servants who have not done proper registration with their PFAs would understand on what to do.
“In the area of gratuity payment, we have expended N6.9billion. So, that is quiet a lot within one year. And we have paid over 2,000 people in terms of gratuity and death benefits in the new and old scheme”.
She said, though the state was still facing the challenge of inherited pension liabilities.
“The only challenge is the huge liabilities the state has to settle. Though, the liabilities have reduced drastically, but it is still something that we need to put more efforts, especially that we have disengaged teachers that have not received their gratuities and death benefits,”
Officials of some Pension Bureau had made presentations on the importance of accurate data to seamless pension payments.
The sensitization was organized by the Kaduna State Pension Bureau in collaboration with the Pension Funds Administrators (PFAs) operating in the State, has in attendance representatives of civil servants from all the MDAs in the state.
Report By AMINU DALHATU
