On Monday, hundreds of retired police officers and their relatives shut down Gate 8 of the Presidential Villa in Abuja, demanding that President Bola Tinubu sign the Police Exit Bill immediately.
The bill is meant to pull the Nigeria Police Force out of the Contributory Pension Scheme. The National Assembly passed it on December 4, 2025, and sent it to the Presidency on March 16, 2026. Tinubu has not signed it.
The protest ran from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and was led by CSP Raphael Irowainu (retd.), National Coordinator of the Police Retired Officers Forum of Nigeria. The demonstrators carried placards that read “End CPS” and “If military, DSS were removed from PENCOM, why not police?” They also chanted, “Police dey work, PenCom dey chop.”
“We are calling on President Bola Tinubu to sign our bill as a matter of urgency,” Irowainu said. “Retirees are scattered all over Nigeria. We will use our votes judiciously and those of our families to determine our future in the coming elections. From Zamfara, Maiduguri to Cross River, we are in thousands.”
Irowainu said most officers retire with severe health problems. “When in service, they kill us. We who survived and managed to retire, they programme us to die again. Many of us here have bullets in our bodies,” he said. “We will remain in Abuja until that bill is signed.”
The group described the CPS as “fraudulent, illegal, inhumane and obnoxious.” Irowainu stressed that other security outfits have already left the scheme. “The soldiers have been exited, the SSS has been exited, the Air Force has been exited, the Navy has been exited, the National Intelligence Agency has been exited,” he said. “The police, who are the fathers of them all, are trapped in this obnoxious Contributory Pension Scheme.”
CSP Mannir Zaria (retd.), National Coordinating Secretary for Retired Police Officers Under the CPS, said wives and children joined the protest to show how bad the welfare situation is. “We are here to appeal to the President to sign the bill to exit the police from the contributory pension scheme and establish a Nigerian Police Force pension body,” Zaria said.
Aisha Yisa, whose husband retired after 35 years, said he gets N30,000 a month. “What can N30,000 buy? Medication? Nothing. Our children have been dropping out of school. We are appealing to you,” she said.
A protest letter submitted to the Villa was signed by Irowainu and National Secretary Dr Nnaemezie Ignatius Enyi (retd.). Copies also went to the Vice President, First Lady, Senate President, Speaker, Defence Minister, IGP, and other senior officials.
The letter showed that a Chief Superintendent gets N3m-N4m as lump sum and N50,000 monthly under the CPS. An Assistant Superintendent gets N1.5m-N2m and N25,000 monthly. An Inspector gets N1m and N20,000 monthly. The retirees called the payments “inhumanity of man to man.”
They warned that if Tinubu does not sign, they will begin an indefinite peaceful protest named “No Retreat, No Surrender” at the Villa and across all 36 state capitals.
The retirees protested at the National Assembly in September 2025 over the same issue. Senate President Godswill Akpabio then said the CPS was “not well thought out” and had brought hardship to officers who risk their lives for the country.
Source: Punch Newspapers
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