Former governor of Anambra State Peter Obi has revealed how he cleared off over N35 billion in arrears of pension and gratuity, saying they were all properly documented.
Mr Obi through a statement issued on Monday and signed by his media adviser Valentine Obienyem was reacting to the claim by the Minister of Labour and Employment Chris Ngige that Obi did not pay the N35 billion in arrears of pension as he claimed.
Obi said in the statement that he was not interested in what anybody else paid or claimed to have paid as pensions and gratuity except his own payments and would therefore not join issues with anybody in that regard.
Insisting that the issues at hand were easy to decipher, the statement said: “There is no point trying to make up issues where there are none. Most pensioners are still alive and very alert mentally; anybody desirous of knowing the truth as it pertains to the payment of their pension and gratuity should go to Anambra State and ask them.”
On the allusion to faulty recourse to statistics by Obi, the statement said: “In Nigeria today, Obi is a known expert in economics and he is empirical in discussing economic issues which makes him to quote a lot of statistics by heart to almost every purpose. In doing this, he makes sure he quotes the right statistics and in the event where mischief makers had tried to dispute his figures, he rested the case by volunteering the source of his statistics. We therefore wonder what any person wants to gain by resurrecting a dead case.”
Though the statement acknowledged seeing Ngige’s claims clearing over N60 billion in arrears of pension and gratuity, which almost doubled what Obi paid, it said it was not its brief to start interrogating him, but that in Obi’s case there were documentary evidence to show.
On the claim by Ngige that he returned schools to the church, the statement said that the church in concern has continued to quote Obi as one who gave them back their schools.
