By Olufemi Ayannuga
There comes a moment in every thoughtful life when silence becomes impossible. A moment when reflection turns into interrogation, and memory into judgment. It was at such a moment, sitting quietly and weighing the long arc of life with its trials and triumphs, that a simple but terrifying question announced itself with full force: After thirty-five years of service, what next?
For thirty-five years, a civil servant in Nigeria wakes before dawn, reports to duty, obeys authority, submits to transfers, endures delayed promotions, faces denied promotions, navigates policies changed mid-stream, copes with salaries eroded by inflation, and deals with hope postponed by promises. For thirty-five years, the state takes the best of his strength, his youth, his intellect, and his loyalty. Then one morning, the gate closes quietly. Salary stops. Allowances vanish. Career progression ends. And the man or woman is handed over to a single lifeline—pension.
This is not a privilege.
It is not a favour.
It is not charity.
It is deferred wages, earned, accumulated, and owed.
Yet, in our national experience, pension has too often been treated as though it were a negotiable inconvenience, a budgetary afterthought, or worse, a playground for corruption and indiscipline.
Under the old Defined Benefit Pension Scheme (DBPS), the promise was simple: serve faithfully, retire honourably, and receive a guaranteed monthly pension for life, with a gratuity paid as a lump sum. In theory, it was humane. In principle, it was just. In intention, it recognised that a worker’s dignity must not expire with his appointment letter.
There was a time when retirees lived on their pensions with modest contentment. Some received pensions longer than the years they served. They aged gracefully. They planned modest lives. They were living proof that society could honour labour beyond the workplace.
But what destroyed this system was not the idea. It was the people entrusted with its management. Let us say it plainly and without apology: The collapse of the old pension scheme was a mirror held up to government itself, revealing weakness, indiscipline, corruption, and a frightening absence of accountability.
The Defined Benefit Pension Scheme did not collapse by accident. It was dismantled by a chain of human failures. The scheme depended entirely on government budgeting. Pension was paid only when governments remembered to pay. When priorities shifted, pensioners were forgotten. Arrears piled up, not because retirees failed the state, but because the state failed its retirees. This was not an economic inevitability; it was administrative negligence.
Funds meant for the elderly were diverted. Pension offices became crime scenes. Ghost pensioners flourished while real pensioners died in queues. Files disappeared. Records were manipulated. And for years, those responsible walked free. A society that steals from its retirees has crossed a moral red line.
Elderly men and women, some frail, some sick, were subjected to endless verification exercises, long queues under the sun, repeated documentation demands, and humiliating delays. Many died waiting. Not because money was unavailable, but because compassion was absent. This was not inefficiency alone. It was institutionalised indifference.
From politicians who refused to fund pension obligations to civil servants who sabotaged records to officials who demanded bribes before files could move, everyone played a role. The DBPS became a casualty of a system where discipline was optional and monitoring was cosmetic. And so, when leaders later declared the old scheme “unsustainable,” one must ask: Unsustainable because it was flawed or because it was abused?
Here lies the heart of this matter. For the average retiree, pension is not supplementary income. It is not extra money. It is not a safety net. It is life itself. It pays for food. It buys medication. It settles rent. It restores dignity. To delay pension is to delay survival. To withhold pension is to sentence the elderly to poverty. To toy with pension is to gamble with human life. And let it be clearly understood: A nation is judged not by how it treats the powerful, but by how it treats the weak, the aged, and the forgotten.
This is not merely a policy discussion. It is a moral warning. Any system, old or new, that allows retirees to suffer, beg, or die waiting for what they earned is a system already condemned by history. Pension injustice does not end with the retiree; it stains institutions, indicts leadership, and poisons public trust.
Governments must understand this truth: When you toy with pension, you are not saving money; you are destroying faith. And when faith in the state dies, loyalty follows it to the grave.
After thirty-five years of service, what must come next is certainty, dignity, and peace. Anything less is betrayal. Let those in authority remember: Every policymaker will one day grow old. Every civil servant will one day retire. Every system built on indiscipline will eventually consume its builders. Pension is not just about money. It is about honour. And honour, once lost, is rarely recovered.
This meaage mirrors the moral indictment of power, pension, and the fate of Retirees in Nigeria.
Ayannuga writes from Ogun State.
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