By Hassan Zaggi /Abuja
A coalition of eight Civil Society Organisations (CS0s) under the aegis of Coalition for Civil Service Pension Reform (CCSPR), has challenged the Senate Committee on Establishment and Pension to show where the alleged N195 billion was misappropriated by the Pension Reform Task Team (PRTT), when and where it was appropriated from.
The national coordinator of the group, Abdullahi Ladan, gave the challenge in Abuja on Wednesday while reacting to claims by a member of the Senate Committee on Pension, Babafemi Ojudu, where he alleged, in an interview with a daily newspaper (not Daily Independent), that chairman of the PRTT, Abdulrasheed Maina, stole billions and had fled to Singapore despite a warrant for his arrest.
Ladan also accused the committee of manipulating the whole sitting of the pension probe because, according to him, "it was seriously compromised by some of the officials standing trial over mismanagement of pension funds in the country."
Ladan stressed that the Senate's report was tainted in the face of the "revealing petition byIsa Shuiabu, former Director of Accounts and Finance (Pension) in the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation, (OHSF), wherein he clearly stated how he bribed the committee through Senator Etuk to slant the report against Maina and the task team.
"It will help for the committee to show Nigerians were the alleged N195 billion came from. This is because the task team came into existence late 2010 and did well by removing pensioners from the streets by having a biometric in place."
The coalition, however, expressed regrets that rather than the task team and Maina being applauded for recovering over N221 billion, captured over 170,000 pensioners biometrically, and detected about 73,000 ghost pensioners from the Head of Service Pension Office, "it was being witch-hunted by committee that was clearly compromised."
