Ex-bank retirees protest over unpaid pensions in Lagos

Former employees of defunct Arab Bank and Assurance Bank staged a protest in Lagos on Wednesday, accusing regulatory authorities of abandoning them for two decades and pushing them into poverty.

The demonstrators, who converged at the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate office at Tafawa Balewa Square on Lagos Island, represent approximately 1,020 affected staff nationwide. They are demanding immediate payment of their outstanding 2009 arrears and an upward review of their monthly pension to the nationally approved N32,000 minimum baseline. Many said they currently receive less than N10,000 a month.

Protest coordinator and ex-Assurance Bank staff member Idowu Oshikoya said: “We are ex-staff of the defunct Arab Bank and Assurance Bank. We worked, and we are qualified to be paid pension. Up till now, many of us are here to be paid; even those who are paid are not sufficiently paid.”

He added that the group had been excluded from a presidential directive meant to extend the N32,000 pension palliative to all federal retirees. “I don’t know how we can survive with that,” he said.

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Another former Assurance Bank worker, Bola Olaniyan, described two decades of failed attempts to get a response from the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Central Bank of Nigeria. “For 20 years, some of our members have not been paid a dime. We wrote to the NDIC, we wrote to the CBN… they never deemed it fit to reply to us,” he said.

Olaniyan, who said he has 35 years of banking service, described receiving N12,000 monthly from PTAD as unacceptable. “It is either they give us, or we die here,” he said.

The protesters noted that many of their colleagues across the country were too frail or impoverished to attend, leaving the Lagos chapter to lead the action. They vowed to continue picketing until their demands were met.

As of press time, PTAD, the NDIC and the CBN had not responded to the protest.