Pensioners go for 20 months without pay
Some pensioners appear before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to present their grievances about the pension scam last year. FILE PHOTO.
Kampala- The ministry of Finance has for the last 20 months not paid pensioners who retired from the defunct Uganda Posts and Telecom Corporation.
The pensioners fault a number of government departments for engaging them in a cat-and-mouse chase as they pursue their retirement benefits.
Information available to this newspaper indicates the ministry of Finance stopped remitting money to Uganda Communications Employees Contributory Pension Scheme (UCECPS) – a government scheme where the workers’ benefits are channeled from the Finance ministry’s Privatisation Unit (PU) - in April 2015.
According to letters this newspaper has seen, Mr Keith Muhakanizi, the Secretary to the Treasury, on July 2, 2015 requested the Auditor General (AG) to undertake a special audit of UCECPS after requests by the scheme to be given more money to pay the pensioners.
When contacted, ministry of Finance spokesperson Jim Mugunga said the ministry could not handle the pensioners’ issues without the results of the AG’s audit.
“There were issues with the fund and the ministry requested for an audit by the AG. We are yet to receive the results,” Mr Mugunga said.
Three months after Mr Muhakanizi’s July 2, 2015 audit request, Ms Keto Nyapendi Kayemba, the assistant AG, asked for more time to complete the audit.
Audit scope widened
In an October 27, 2015 letter to the director of the Privatisation Unit on the update of the audit, Ms Kayemba said “the scope of this special audit has inevitably been extended to start right from inception of the scheme in 1998. We anticipate, therefore, that the exercise will necessitate at least two months to be completed.”
Ms Kayemba’s audit extension request should have ended in December last year but to date, 11 months later, no report has been presented to the Finance ministry, the pensioners or their fund managers.
It has since taken more than a year to audit the fund, which has less than 700 pensioners.
The AG spokesperson, Ms Gloria Namugera, explained that the process of validation of pensioners countrywide and calculating the pension funds from 1998 to date required more time than had been anticipated.
“By early December, the audit report should be out,” Ms Namugera said.
Challenged on whether it is the AG’s habit to recommend halting pay to employees and clients of organisations they are auditing, Ms Namugera said: “It is not up to us to recommend pay or not but an organisation would be more comfortable to pay after validation. The information provided after auditing is vital and may have implications on current and future payments.”
Mr David Nkojo, the UCECPS chairman of board of trustees, said the fund’s hands are tied in as far as helping their clients.
“We are waiting for government to give us money. We have been doing audits but the Secretary to the Treasury [Muhakanizi] requested for this particular one to be done by the AG,” he said.
The pensioners, however, have contested the legality of their staying unpaid for the whole period.
“It is illegal not to pay us. We should be paid. Many of us are dying. Since we started the scheme, we have lost more than 100 colleagues,” Mr Santos Alima, the chairperson of Uganda Communications Pensioners Association (UCOPA), told Sunday Monitor in an interview.
Mr Shem Sunday, one of the pensioners, wonders why they are being made to suffer.
“We are not represented at the pension scheme which was created by government. Also, government and the ministry of Finance have our accounts... Let the ministry of Finance pay us as it sorts out its fund,” he said.
On average, the pensioners, according to Mr Sunday, are paid about Shs120 million per month, which translates to about Shs1.4 billion per year or Shs2.4 billion for the 20 months the pensioners haven’t been paid. Mr Sunday estimates that government owes them about Shs16.6 billion in arrears of unpaid pension increment and full pension after 15 years since 2004.
Our attempts to get Mr Nkojo to give us the actual amount he has been paying out to the pensioners were futile by press time.
Mr Francis Kanyeihamba, another of the aggrieved pensioners, expressed disappointment at the government’s “refusal” to pay them.
“We are old men and women. We are sick and cannot buy drugs. The pension is our livelihood. Personally, I have to buy drugs and that is the money I depend on to do that.”
Another war
Stopping the payments aside, the more than 700 pensioners are also fighting on another front.
In 2002, they challenged government on “anomalies” in how their pension was paid, including whether they were entitled to pension increments.
The Attorney General (AG) and the pensioners, through their lawyer Omunyokol & Co Advocates, entered a consent judgment in 2003, agreeing to pay the retirees’ outstanding pensions and increments up to December 2003.
Despite the consent judgment, government continued to pay the pension, but without the pension increments.
For six years, between 2004 and 2010, the pensioners, according to documents Sunday Monitor has seen, continued to demand for the increments from the Privatisation Unit without much success.
Officials at the Privatisation Unit insisted that the amount paid by December 2003 was final. The Privatisation Unit sought a legal opinion of the AG, who in turn sought advice from the Public Service ministry.
The Public Service ministry in a May 25, 2010 letter, affirmed that the UPTC retirees were entitled to pension and a review.
The ministry quoted Article 254(2) of the Constitution, which states that “the pension payable to any person shall be exempt from tax and shall be subject to periodic review to take account of changes in the value of money”. Still the Privatisation Unit did not pay the increments to the pensioners.
In a December 2, 2010 legal opinion to the director of Privatisation Unit and the Solicitor General, said: “The existing consent judgment was partially executed for arrears up to 2003, and therefore, pension increments from year 2003 to date should be paid to the pensioners”. Still the pensioners were not paid but continued pressing for their pay until March 2012 when they went back to court and on September 28, 2012, Justice Benjamin Kabiito ruled in the pensioners’ favour.
The waiting once again started and after almost a year of government not implementing the court decision, the group’s lawyers sought an order to pay.
Once the Attorney General’s office learnt of the move, the government went to court and asked to appeal Justice Kabiito’s ruling.
But after reviewing, Ms Harriet Ssali Nalukwago, the assistant Registrar of the Court of Appeal, dismissed with costs the government’s application to be granted more time to appeal Justice Kabiito’s ruling. This implied that the pensioners were supposed to be paid their pension increment as per Justice Kabiito’s ruling.
The government appealed Ms Nalukwago’s decision and in his September 13, 2013 ruling, Justice Eldard Mwangusya ordered the Attorney General to file a notice of appeal on Justice Kabiito’s ruling in seven days from the date of ruling and a memorandum of appeal in 14 days from the date of ruling.
To date, the Attorney General has neither complied with Justice Mwangusya’s order to file a notice of appeal by September 20, 2013 nor filed a Memorandum of Appeal by September 27, 2013 as directed by the judge. The UPTC pensioners have not been paid.
“If they cannot look after us, let them take us to the ministry of Public Service,” Mr Alima said.
