Speaker of House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, on Thursday urged the executive to ensure that backlog of pensions were paid promptly, warning that excuses would not be accepted.
Dogara made this known while reacting to briefing by Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun and her Budget and National Planning counterpart, Sen. Udoma Udo Udoma, on efforts to offset arrears owed Nigerian pensioners.
He expressed confidence that the promise of President Muhammadu Buhari on the pensions would be kept.
“When the president promised that he was going to release money for bailout to States so that they can pay backlog of salaries and pensions, he did.
“We will not accept any excuse that leaves part of this pension funds hanging,” he said.
According to him, I don’t know where you got the money to bail out the states from, but wherever you got the money from that is where we are going to get the money to solve this problem.
“I want to believe this will be the last intervention we will be having with regards to the issue of pensions in this country. That is my charge.
“The message the House will be sending to the President through the ministers is `when you meet him to brief him about this engagement, tell him that we have taken his words to the bank and we believe that we would cash it’.”
Meanwhile, the spokesman of the House of Representatives Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Abdulrazak Namdas, said the 2017 Appropriation Bill would be passed after the Easter break.
Namdas told reporters after plenary on Thursday that all legislative work on the fiscal document would be concluded as soon as the Assembly resumed from the recess.
He explained that the House intervened in the issue of arrears of pensioners’ entitlements to enable the ministers in charge of finances to address the matter.
According to him, the explanation provided by the two ministers will go a long way to assuage the pains of the nation’s senior citizens.
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