By Bimbola Oyesola
The National Pension Commission (PenCom) yesterday alerted the public of what it considered the renewed campaign of outrageous falsehood against the organisation and its Director General, Mrs Aisha Dahir-Umar, over some ‘imagined financial impropriety’. The PenCom management said although the promoters of the fiction went to the extent of manufacturing documents and listing non-existent bank accounts to make the fabrication look real, it maintained that “a fiction remains a fiction and can never become the truth no matter how many times it is repeated and recycled.”
According to the management, it was alleged that the Director General was paid millions of dollars as estacodes for foreign trips she did not embark upon in 2020.
The statement read, “This poor attempt at calumny is exposed by the fact that there was a global lockdown in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic during which international travels were restricted.
“Offices were shut down and most people had to hold virtual meetings. It is, thus, most outlandish to suggest that any government agency would claim to be paying allowances to its officials for international travels when most airports were shut down globally.”
PenCom explained further that, official foreign trips require strict documentation, including air tickets, stamped passport pages and evidence of number of days spent.
“Rates for estacodes are standardised. If the DG were to spend two years abroad without returning to the country for one day, it would still be impossible for her to claim a million dollars as estacode. The desperate fabricators need to respect the intelligence of Nigerians,” the statement said.
The PenCom management noted that the fabrication would have been politically motivated, “We are aware of current political intrigues in the country caused by the jostling for appointments, but we believe there are more decent ways of going about it than peddling tales by moonlight and using notorious online outlets to push the lies to unsuspecting readers.
“The public is implored to ignore these fake documents and the discredited allegations being recycled at the slightest opportunity. The Commission has nothing to hide and will continue to run a transparent and accountable system.”