PTAD and the Pernicious tale by Oluwatoyin

Nothing in nature is so decried and yet so universally practiced as falsehood. A mighty, governing lie goes round the world, and has almost banished truth out of it. The greatest annoyance and disturbance of mankind has been from one of these two things, force or fraud; and force often allies with fraud. It is the tongue that drives the world before it and it is hard to assign any one thing but lying, which God and man so unanimously hate; and it is even harder to tell whether it does a greater dishonour to God, or mischief to man. The unlawfulness of lying is grounded upon this, that a lie is properly a sort of species of injustice, and a violation of the right of that person to whom the false speech is directed.

For one who doesn’t have a clue on how the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) was transformed by the pioneer Executive Secretary /Director General Mrs. Nellie Mayshak would tend to believe the malicious claims by the then Acting DG Mr Muritala Oluwatoyin that he cleaned the mess in the agency.

This falsehood, no doubt, played itself in the recent suspension of the embattled Executive Secretary and Director General Mrs. Nellie Mayshak, who was suspended about seven months ago by the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun based on allegations that are yet to be proven. I equally did not see any wisdom on the side of the federal government to also appoint a new DG without making public the outcome of the probe panel it instituted.

The transformation of PTAD wouldn’t have been possible without Mrs Mayshak , an internationally acclaimed technocrat. Nigerians seem to forget so soon the Abdulrasheed Maina saga when he headed the agency know then as Presidential Task Team on Pesion Reform (PTTPR) and how pensioners were dying without getting a dime from the organization. The then administration of President Jonathan, in search of a solution to address the problem bedeviling pensioners under the Defined Benefits Scheme, invited Mayshak who was plying her career overseas, she was appointed the pioneer head of the agency. After a holistic review of the challenges confronting the scheme, she warned it was not going to be business as usual.
Being a renowned technocrat, she brought to bare her expertise to build an institution that is today the envy of others.

It was Mrs Nellie Mayshak who digitalized the old pension scheme for effective service delivery to ensuring seamless payment of pensioners and also brought transparency into the system. PTAD under her watch leveraged on technology to get database of pensioners, which helped the agency, know the actual number of pensioners thus removing many ghost pensioners from the system. The facts are there for everyone to see.

Mayshak was accused of fraud because she refused to allow the few cabal who have seen pension fund as their milking cow to have their ways. She introduced the biometric verification and the digitization of the database and the whole process which resulted in removal of thousands of ghost pensioners. Perhaps it is said that ‘if you fight corruption, it fights back’; and that is the whole scenario that led to her suspension and till date the Minister of Finance found it very difficult to make public the outcome of the probe panel.

In one of her speeches Mrs. Mayshak, said the directorate has concluded plans to digitalise the old pension scheme known as Defined Benefits Scheme for effec tive service delivery.

Again, speaking in Lagos during the PTAD Stakeholders Sensitisation Workshop on Pension Management under the Defined Benefits Scheme for South West Zone, Mayshak said the digitisation of the scheme would ensure seamless payment of pen sioners as well as bring transparency into the system.

She also revealed that PTAD was making use of technology to address all the mess it inherited from the old pension system, adding the electronic payment format is working as it keeps the money safe as well as introduces transparency to the system.”PTAD will leverage on technology to get database of pensioners; the database, she explained, will help the agency to know the actual number of pensioners by removing ghost pensioners from the system.”

Mayshak said the pension funds for the Defined Benefits Scheme was now domiciled at the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN and no more in commercial banks, while assuring Nigerians that with the new development, pension money was safe and the interaction with the fund now was through paper work and instructions to Accountant General Office to pay

The Acting DG in a desperate attempt to take credit from Mayshak’s effort told some journalists that “Before I took over, we had a lot of issues. In fact, I have the personal experience of my uncle who applied for over two years and they were asking him to wait for clarification but when I took over and based on that experience, I found out that the problem is that of records.”

“There have been no additional funds released to us. We make the savings from ghost manes we have been able to remove from the payroll. In one particular week; we closed about 800 different accounts in one day from various banks which we passed to ICPC for investigation.

Mr Oluwatoyin is barely six months in PTAD and has done nothing rather than inflating the PTAD payroll . It is on record that Mayshak has zero tolerance for corruption when she was piloting the affairs of PTAD. A lot of pensioners and public affairs analysts have said that Mayshak’s suspension was a deliberate plot against the DG by those who couldn’t have the opportunity to dip their hands into pensioners funds because she had blocked all the loopholes.

But the vaunting about by the Acting Director-General of PTAD, Mr. Muritala Oluwatoyin, at a media interaction in Abuja some days ago has no moral justification to lay claim any to the achievements so far recorded in PTAD. Oluwatoyin, who was recently appointed in an acting capacity from the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, AGF, was sharing PTAD’s difficulties in its bid to clean the mess created by fraudulent civil servants in the past to enrich themselves through the ghost workers syndrome.

Eleojo Augustine a retired civil servant wrote from Lokoja