The 1999 Constitution allows State legislatures to make laws enabling former Governors and Deputy Governors to receive pensions.
So, on April 18th, 2005, former Governor Donald Duke, assented to the Cross River State Gubernatorial Pension Law, to provide a pension to any person who has held office as a Governor or Deputy Governor in Cross River State. The State commenced payment of the pensions from the consolidated revenue fund of Cross River State.
In 2015, ten years after the enactment of the law, the Cross River State House of Assembly decided to amend the law to accommodate the Speaker and Deputy Speaker as beneficiaries. A new law, the Cross River State Gubernatorial Pensions (Amendment) Law 2005 came into effect on the 19th day of May 2015, after the governor’s assent. It was titled: “A law to provide a pension to any person who has held office as a Governor, Deputy Governor, Speaker or Deputy Speaker in Cross River State and for matters connected therewith”.
Five years after, on the 12th of March 2020, a former Speaker and a beneficiary of pension under the amended law, approached the Industrial Court of Nigeria, sitting in Calabar asking the court to compel the State to pay him pension as a former Acting Governor, having acted in that capacity when the Governorship Election Tribunal, nullified the election that brought Senator Liyel Imoke and Efiok Cobham, to office and ordered that he becomes governor in acting capacity pending the rerun.
Frank Adah, who was already a beneficiary of the amended pension law, approached the Industrial Court after his pension was stopped by the State Government when the State called for verification of all pensioners and the former Speaker failed to show up for that verification exercise and the fact that the pension for former governors was higher than that of former Speakers.
The court declined his prayers and further held that provisions of the amended Cross River Pensions Law which gives pension to a former Speaker or Deputy Speaker, were not expressly mentioned by section 124(5) of the Constitution, and such law is inconsistent with the Constitution and null and void.
Soon after the judgment of the Court, the State government implemented the judgment and stopped the payment of pensions to all categories of former Speakers and Deputies, who were hitherto benefiting from the law. Worried by this development, the House of Assembly, started and hurriedly completed the process of amending the Gubernatorial Pension Law 2005 which was the surviving law by virtue of the judgment of the court.
They amended the law to delete provisions providing for “pension” and created a “special allowance” for the former Speakers and Deputy Speakers of the House, even when the job of fixing allowances for public officials is the constitutional role of the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC.
The amendment returned Speakers and Deputy Speakers, to earn pensions through the back door by changing the nomenclature. The new bill was passed by the House of Assembly called the Cross River State Special Allowance Law 2021. The intention of the bill was to repeal the Cross River State Gubernatorial Pension Law No 2 of 2005 and its subsequent amendments of Law No 4 2015.
One intriguing criminality here is that in 2021 when that law was passed, Mr. Aka Bisong, the present Clerk of the House of Assembly, was not the Clerk and could not have signed the bill. But the signed copies of the bill are now carrying his signature. What has happened is that the Governor, conscious of his imminent departure, took the bill through the back door and tripled the figures of the special allowances, got his chums in the House of Assembly and the Clerk to consent and he then secretly assented to it.
Yours sincerely.
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.