…..ONDO GOVERNMENT CHARGES PUBLIC SERVANTS ON EARLY RETIREMENT PLAN
Public Servants in Ondo State have been charged to to draw their retirement plans so as to live stress-free lives after exciting service.
The state Head of Service, Pastor Kayode Ogundele gave the charge on wednesday 28th September 2022 at a sensitisation and pre-retirement workshop for teachers and civil servants disengaging from the state public service in the year 2023.
The Head of Service, who blamed untimely deaths of retirees and indecent lives by others on failure to have adequate plans for life after retirement, said officers did not have to wait for the last wait till the end of their service to plan their post-retirement lives.
Ogundele noted that the state government under the present administration of Governor Akeredolu had put several measures in place to phase out some encumbrances bedevilling timely payment of pensions and gratuities to the state retirees, adding that more plans were on the pipeline to make the process seamless.
In his words, “you will recall that one of the major reform initiatives of the present administration is the initialization of Pension Administration aimed at ensuring seamless retirement and gratuity payment processing.
“It is on record that before the present administration, management of retirement and gratuity payment was bedevilled by with poor documentation, manual processing, cumbersome clearance procedure, lack of sound pension policy framework,” He said.
Pastor Ogundele however relayed some of the recently emplaced to ease the burden of retirees to include centralization of retiring officers in the Pension Transitional Department, decentralisation of pension forms into all the 18 local government areas in the state, digitalization of pension and gratuity administration and online updating of pensioners records among others.
Speaking earlier in his welcome address, the Permanent Secretary of the state Pension Transitional Department, Mr Dele Akinmoye said the need to educate retiring officers on issues they would likely encounter in the processing and payment of their retirement benefits informed the sensitisation programme.
He urged participants to avail themselves of the opportunity of the programme and put all issues raised to effective use.
Two papers on “Ease of Processing Retirement Benefit’ and ‘Managing Your Health in Retirement’ were delivered by Mr Dele Akinmoye and Dr Olufemi Ajayi respectively.”
Sina Adeyeye,
Office of the HoS
