Zamfara Vows To Settle Pension Gratuitous Of Over 4,000 Retirees

From Ibrahim Kaulahi, Gusau

Zamfara State Government has announced it’s readiness to pay all the backlog of pensions gratuities owing to over 4,000 workers who have retired from 2015 to date with a view to restore lost hopes in the minds of thousands of households in the state.

This was disclosed while responding to questions by newsmen on the update of the ongoing payments of the owed gratuitous by the Permanent Secretary of the state ministry of finance, Alhaji Muhammad Abubakar who doubles as the Chairman of the Workers Pension Verification and Payment Committee.

Alhaji Abubakar said, the verification and payment committee has already paid a total number of 413 beneficiaries which consumed the sum of over N631 million after receiving an executive approval from state Governor Dauda Lawal being the first phase of the exercise.

He further disclosed that, the committee has also submitted another verified lists of beneficiaries right from the 2015 to 2017 and 2018 to 2020 now waiting for the Governor’s approval before embarking on payments as expected.

In the same light, the exercise would also validate and authenticate workers that retired from 2021, 2022 and 2023, adding that, all that have been captured on the list of the beneficiaries may not be possible to scale through because some anomalies including gost retirees and fake documents may be encountered during the exercise.

“Whatever the case, the committee has so far achieved 70 percent of the exercise, and I am sure, at the end of the day, we would secure handsome savings for the state government”, Alhaji Abubakar has assured.

According to him, the committee did not attend to the list of next of kin in the first phase of the exercise as for those who died, because the law has to be respected, saying, “We have asked the teeming next of kin to provide names of the courts of law nearest to them where their payments would be channelled through for judicial authentication”.