Ondo Govt charges public servants on early retirement plans

Ondo State government has charged public servants to draw up their retirement plans early, so as to live stress-free lives after exiting service.

The state Head of Service, Pastor Kayode Ogundele, gave the charge on Wednesday in Akure.

He spoke at a sensitisation and pre-retirement workshop for teachers and civil servants disengaging from the state public service in 2023.

Ogundele said that failure to have adequate plans for life after retirement contributed to indecent living and untimely deaths of retirees.

The head of service said that officers did not have to wait till the end of their service to plan their post-retirement lives.

He said that the Gov. Rotimi Akeredolu-led administration had put several measures in place to ensure timely payment of pensions and gratuities to the state retirees.

“You will recall that one of the major reform initiatives of the present administration is the initialisation 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.

Ogundele listed the initiatives to ease the burden of retirees to include centralisation of retiring officers in the Pension Transitional Department and decentralisation of pension forms into all the 18 local government areas in the state.

He said that digitalisation of pension and gratuity administration and online updating of pensioners records were among others.

Earlier, in his welcome address, the Permanent Secretary of the Ondo State Pension Transitional Department, Mr Dele Akinmoye, explained the rationale for the sensitisation programme.

He said it was based on the need to educate retiring officers on issues they would likely encounter in the processing and payment of their retirement benefits.

Akinmoye 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 Akinmoye and Dr Olufemi Ajayi respectively.