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The Director-General, Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Ibrahim Dasuki-Arabi, on Friday, said in a bid to reduce deaths among retirees, the Federal Government thought it is expedient to keep them busy through training on self-reliance.
Dasuki-Arabi made this disclosure in Gombe at the end of the 2024 pre-retirement training programme for retired/retiring officers of selected federal parastatals for the North-East region.
Speaking on the five-day training, Dasuki-Arabi emphasised its importance, noting that the high mortality rate among retirees gave rise to the training.
He said, “It’s very important because it is among the eight priority areas of the President and Commander-in-Chief. How do you engage citizens, get value out of them, and how do we support them to give value back to society after they have exited service? After our survey, we observed that the mortality rate is very high among people who retire from service. This initiative is among those that we have come up with so that people will learn one or two skills as they exit the service.
“We have come to celebrate with federal civil servants in the North-East political zone that have retired from federal parastatals, agencies, and commissions of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We have institutionalised training for federal civil servants exiting the service. We train them on skills acquisition so that as they exit the public service they have something else to do.
“The entire list we have received from MDAs is about 10,000 but because of paucity of funds, we can train 600. We are hoping that with this excellent result seen the President and Commander-in-Chief is going to approve another resource for us to do another batch of the training.”
On the Federal Government’s expectations, he hoped that the major aim of the training would eventually achieved.
“We expect them to learn and take away what they have learned that was why we took them for field study yesterday to see what a retiree has done. We want to form a community of practice, we have picked all their details and searched for evidence. We will come back after one year to see what has happened to ensure that they got value for the money expended by the government.”
In his remarks on the call by pensioners for 80 per cent of their pension, Dasuki-Arabi stated, “If you bought a car 20 years ago what is the position of the car today? Now you are changing tyres, shock absolvers. This reform initiative on pension started in 2004 before it was amended to build bridges that are higher than us.”
Hailing the Federal Government for the training, Janet Ali-Kumo, a retired Chief Nursing Officer of the Federal Teaching Hospital Gombe, urged authorities to give healthy and not tired pensioners contract jobs.
She said, “This programme has come at the right time. I just retired this month September 2024. We appreciate the facilitators, especially the DG. As you can see I’m very agile, and active. Somebody like me that just retired without physical challenge if they call me back on the contract I will appreciate and most of us will appreciate.”
Another retiree, a former Chief Lecturer, Department of Chemistry, College of Education Technical, Tony Amaefule, said he planned for his retirement before it finally came.
“In the course of my 35 years of service, I had started preparing for my retirement. I didn’t wait for the programme, I’m an Igbo man. I started preparing for my retirement and I was 100 per cent ready for my retirement before it came.
“If you are not married and you have not reached the age to marry as a civil servant every time take a bank loan and purchase a plot of land, when you finish paying that one take another one by the time you reach 10 years the first one must have risen, you can sell one to buy a car, sell another one to build a house”, he said.
