AN ASSESSMENT OF RETIREMENT BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION IN NIGERIA. A RESEARCH PROJECT MATERIAL ON PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Retirement is a phase of life that every employee must reach whether prepared for or not. It is the point in time when an employee chooses to leave his or her employment permanently (which could be voluntary or involuntary), and generally coincides with the employee’s eligibility to collect retirement resources ranging from social security to company pensions, etc. It is an inevitable stage in someone’s life be it in the private or public service, it is a period in time whereby one’s effort in an organization and role as a paid worker ceases, (Agoro, 2009; Ahmed, 2007; Bassey & Asinya, 2008).
This can be as a result of ill health, age or statutorily completing the number of years. With the reform of the civil service decree No. 43 of 1988, retirement age has been put at 60 years or 35 years in service. Whichever comes first, there arises the need to carefully and adequately manage these categories of workers who had given most of their life, time and efforts to the actualisation of organizational growth and its development. Thus, it presents a worse situation when the retiree is not adequately prepared to face this ultimate phase of life. This among others have necessitated the need for a pension administration in order to cater for future responsibilities of these categories of workers and to enable them have a similar and reasonable standard of living prior to what obtains while they were in active service. In most developing countries with Nigeria particularly, government restrict working age of public civil servants to prevent an ageing labour force and allowing entrants of young able-bodied labour for increasing efficiency and productivity, (Federal Republic of Nigeria Official Gazette, 2004). This is important because as an employee becomes older, his Marginal Physical Productivity of Labour (MPPL) will decline, thus retaining such an employee in the service of the organization will lead to running an organization at a loss. Hence, why the statutory working age in the public service is fixed at sixty (60) years or thirty-five (35) years of unbroken active working service before retirement, but the Retirement Age Harmonization Act of 2012 stamps the retirement age of judicial officers and academic staff of tertiary institutions at 70 and 65years respectively because of the belief that “the older, the wiser” (Maji, 2014). During retirement, a retiree public officerusually receives certain benefits in the form of gratuity and pension.
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